


The Winter King

by captainkilly



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Karen needs a break, Kastle Christmas Secret Santa Gift Exchange, Lieberman family dinner, a Kastle holiday, a looming Wilson Fisk appears, all good things for Christmas, and some Hanukkah joy on account of the Liebermans, flowers and mythic stories, secluded cabin in the woods, set about a year post-Punisher S1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-24 07:29:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13208907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: Karen Page is tired of being hurt and threatened. When Wilson Fisk threatens to claw his way back into civilisation, Frank Castle steps in to offer her a safe escape.





	The Winter King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [awwcoffeenooooo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/awwcoffeenooooo/gifts).



> Spun into this work are smaller and greater references to the myriad and quite mythic stories (including a by-my-own-hand retelling) about the Holly King and Oak King, at least one Christmas carol, Robert Frost's _Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening_ , F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Crack-Up_ , and countless callbacks to Daredevil season 2 and The Punisher season 1. As David Lieberman is canonically Jewish, it seemed right to me to add tiny sprinkles of a Hanukkah celebration in the mix here as well before moving forward into a more Christmas-y vibe.

 

She comes home to white flowers.

 

Karen Page blinks as her hands brush past the orchids, roses, and meadowsweet before they land on the sky-blue ribbon that fastens them to the door. Her fingers tighten around the neat loops and curves of the bow. A rose's thorn scrapes past her skin only a moment. Not enough to draw blood. Not enough to hurt, even though she needs it to. She has to be sure this is real. Has to make sure this isn't another nightmare born of heavy medication and a haze of pain. Her hand clenches around the stems, digs the thorns into her flesh, unties the ribbon and loosens the flowers off the doorknob.

 

It's _real_.

 

Her eyes are water and salt spilling over all her hardened edges. She rubs at her cheeks until they're flush with red and pink. Her sleeve comes away damp. Her nose drips salt-flavoured water into the curve of her mouth. She inhales noisily. Snorts up the pain. Swallows the hurt. Opens the door and steps into a too-cold and too-bare room.

 

She's been in this apartment for a little over a year now. She can't say she's used to it, not really, even when she lays the flowers down with care and starts to shrug her coat off as though she's finally come home after a long day. Winces when the fabric slides over her bandages. Lets out a sharp hiss when she has to tug her sleeves over the bruises that litter her wrists. Her breath comes out in shallow gasps and short huffs. If she listens to herself a bit too closely, she hears a slight rattle in her lungs. Something her doctor had called residue, something that will eventually fix itself.

 

Karen Page thinks she's far too broken for her body to feel like it can heal anymore.

 

She's not dying or anything. Supposes that's a small favour, even when every bone within her _hurts_ and her skin feels too tight for the thing inside of her that's set to devour her whole. Bruises fade, concussions fix themselves given time, cuts and scrapes heal, and bullet wounds turn out all right as long as they're clean. She has to believe that. Has to summarise it for herself even when she doesn't recognise her own face in the mirror and her body protests as soon as she draws breath.

 

She shudders out a breath. Clenches her right hand around the table. Her left is almost useless after the two bullets she took in her arm and shoulder. Claire had called her lucky when she'd come in to check on Karen's injuries. Brett Mahoney is currently convinced she's really got nine lives. Karen feels neither cat-like nor in possession of good fortune. She just feels angry. So furious that white-hot rage coils and pools deep down in the parts of her belly that haven't been carved up. So mad that she wants to scream more than cry, fight more than hide, seek vengeance rather than be the bigger person.

 

Her cheeks flush brightest red when she dumps old and dried-out flowers out of her blue vase unceremoniously and refreshes the water it holds. She busies herself with unwrapping the new flowers from their ribbon prison. Clamps down on the rage that leaves her pinching the stems and petals before wrapping the ribbon so tightly around her hand that it leaves an imprint on her skin. She lets out a soft breath. Thinks she smells something warm and citrus-y beneath the rose-tinged scent that drifts into her nostrils.

 

It's the closest she's been to him in months.

 

There's no sharp stab of loss accompanying such a thought this time. Her tongue is not yet coated in ashes, nor does her mouth feel stuffy with dust and forgotten time. She doesn't cry now, even when there are still dried tear tracks on her cheeks that her sleeve did not fully erase. Truth is that it's always been like this. He's always been in and out of her life this way since the day she first ran into his path. A brief smile curves at her lips. Not for the first time, she wishes he was here.

 

Karen Page is no stranger to landing herself in the crossfire. She's always known life was going to end up being this way. If she's honest, and she desperately tries to stop lying to herself of late, she craves its complexity. She needs every other step to be one of seeking balance, as though she's dancing in the wind to a rolling drum of the tide that laps at her heels and sinks into her blood. She's never felt more alive than in the moments she thought she was going to die.

 

She needs to ask him if this is how it always is. If this is the fight he can't stay away from even if he tries. Wonders what she'll do if he affirms it.

 

Worse: wonders who she will be if he denies it.

 

She wraps the ribbon around the vase's edge and uses one of her hairclips to tighten it. Her left arm throbs in indignance at being ignored this way, though she knows moving it will only worsen the tight feeling in her muscles. Her nerves are wound tighter than the ribbon and her hand trembles as she sets the vase down on the windowsill.

 

For all her talk of loving the crossfire's heartbeat, she doesn't know how to handle it when she dances too close to death's precipice. She stands alone upon the edge, sharp as a knife and trickier than a house of cards, and stares into its abyss. Feels her soul quail from it, desperate to stay alive as it is. She can't turn back from it now. Can't look away.

 

There's something inside of her that's been stripped raw and laid bare for all the world to see. It's why Foggy always mentions they should go get a drink but then forgets all about actually getting one. It's why her contact with Trish Walker is at a bare necessities minimum that's about their jobs more often than not, even when she thinks the other woman could be a friend if she dared take that chance. It's why her throat still goes dry at the thought of Matt in a way that makes the end of the world follow in its footsteps, even when she's not sure she ever knew the man at all.

 

There is so much loss that breaks her heart. Shatters her nerves and scatters her to the winds. Her breath is fog on the cool window's glass. Her face is a blur and her features are that of a stranger. She wonders if anyone would still recognise her, now. Karen Page, bloodied and beaten and almost-but-not-quite broken, stands before her window and stares out into winter. She's all jagged edges like the knife that cut her, blunt force coiled in her body tighter than the rope she was tied with, sharp pangs of loss that echo in her bullet wounds. Her hand trembles. Her breath is sharp in her chest.

 

Karen is not one to contemplate murder too often, but she thinks if Wilson Fisk stood before her right now she would wrap her hands around his neck and squeeze until he would see James Wesley staring down at him disapprovingly from whatever afterlife evil's henchmen go to when they die.

 

None of them can prove it was him. It's just her and her gut feeling at war with the rest of the world that somehow seems content to ignore the worst of men like Fisk. Mahoney has literally told her that she's made a lot of enemies in recent memory with the articles she keeps putting out, as if any of the people she's gone after lately have the resources to plan and carry out an attack like the one she suffered. Foggy's convinced there's something shady going on, but he keeps repeating that Wilson Fisk is still locked tight inside his jail cell with no current options of escaping that plight.

 

It does nothing to make her feel better.

 

Karen Page sinks down on one of her kitchen chairs and wishes she could get her hands on a gun.

 

*****

 

Even with a gun tucked away in her purse again, she does not feel better.

 

She knows now how easy it is to be disarmed at a moment's notice. All it takes is just one moment of inattention. As nervous as she is, as skittish as she has become, she knows that even she cannot be aware of her surroundings all the time. Still, there's something to be said for having the means to fight back. She loses count of the times her hand reaches into her purse since she left the apartment.

 

She pulls the gun out onto her lap when the unthinkable happens at work.

 

"Jesus, Page, could you possibly get _any_ scarier?"

 

Ellison shuts the door to her office behind him and eyes her critically. His eyes roam over the gun before settling on the set of her jaw and the tightness in her face. Exasperated with her though he may sound, Mitchell Ellison isn't a fool. He knows fear better than he does most other emotions, which he claims is from striking fear into the hearts of his _Sports_ editors but which she knows is from all the years he's spent talking down anxious witnesses. She knows he hears it in her shaky exhale and sees it in her wide eyes.

 

She doesn't care. Sets the gun on her desk and coils her hand around it. Her eyes never leave the bouquet that was placed on her desk by a well-meaning intern not five minutes ago. Hand-delivered, they'd said. Not the regular delivery guy, either, but somebody who hadn't even possessed enough manners to take his cap and sunglasses off in the building. Her gaze is fixed on the vase, because she can't bear to look at the flowers again.

 

Black roses, wilted meadowsweet, peonies and calla lilies. A card she hasn't dared touch.

 

"Secret admirer?"

 

She huffs out a breath at Ellison's question. They both know this couldn't be further from the truth, but she appreciates his brief attempt to make light of the situation. Feels the remaining air escape her lungs at the way he raises an eyebrow at her. Trust Ellison to make her feel light again. Her hands don't leave the gun, but her eyes do leave the offending vase for a moment.

 

"Threat," she clips out. Grounds it out between a shaky breath and half a cough. If she didn't know this from the state of the offending flowers alone, she would know it from the way her heart seized up in her chest at the sight of something so purposeful. "I want them out of this office. Right now."

 

Black roses would be a departure from the all-white she always receives, but perhaps not an unwelcome change. Wilted meadowsweet is normal this time of year. Hell, she doesn't know how he got his hands on a blooming version of the flower in midwinter for the bouquet he'd tied to her door in the first place. It's not those two flowers that have her worried.

 

Peonies are for Maria. Calla lilies are for Lisa and Frankie. They are _never_ hers.

 

She can't explain this to Ellison. Can't find the words to say that Frank's sole request in prison was that she would sometimes place some flowers on the graves of his family. _In my absence_ , he had said, as if he was going away on a long journey and didn't know when he'd be coming home again. His eyes had been wild, and lost, and unfocused. She'd acquiesced to it softly. Had learned to fit her armsful of peonies and calla lilies between his grief somehow, as if oceans of the flowers would be enough of a cushion for his body to collapse upon. She hopes they carry Maria and his children on the wind and in the water that swarms the earth. Thinks his family deserves that freedom.

 

She feels anything but free herself.

 

"These tied to what has you looking like you lost a fight with a meat grinder?" Ellison fingers the roses' petals for a moment. Leaves the card alone just like she did. Years of threats have wisened him up to evidence that may matter. "You shouldn't have come in, Karen. Look at you. You're barely capable of standing up on your own."

 

"I don't trust anybody else to get me what I need." A shark-like grin flits across her face briefly before she sobers up. She suppresses a wince as she leans closer to him. Grimaces. "To be fair, I didn't expect to be coming in this week at all. Like you said, I look tragic and feel even worse."

 

"And yet, here you are. Carrying a gun into my house and receiving vaguely threatening flowers by courier. Anything else I need to know?"

 

She takes a deep breath. Assesses the man in front of her for a moment. Ellison, on his part, seems content to just stare her down from behind his glasses in a way that is all too familiar. She's seen that look on him a thousand times. Her stomach loops for a moment when she realises the last time before now was when she woke in a white room to a world of searing pain.

 

"I think Wilson Fisk wants me dead," she says.

 

Mitchell Ellison sinks down on the chair in front of her and puts his head in his hands. Removes his glasses and sets them on her desk. If she didn't know better, she'd say several new gray hairs sprouted in his beard in the past five minutes alone.

 

"Can you prove it?" Ever the reporter, Ellison is, and she's glad for it even when he fixes her with another beady-eyed stare. "Why you and not the lawyers you worked with?"

 

She snorts at that. "I did a _lot_ of legwork on his case. My fingerprints are all over the evidence that put him behind bars. I'm looking for more evidence now. There is something strange about his situation in jail. Too much freedom, for one, and he may have pulled some strings I was previously unaware of." She tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear and gestures at the paperwork she's amassed on her desk. "I'm going back over anything I can get my hands on, because I don't trust that Fisk is content to sit in jail and let life go by without meddling in _something_."

 

"And you think those flowers," Ellison indicates them with a jerk of his head, "are connected with the digging you're doing."

 

"Almost sure of it."

 

She can feel James Wesley's accusatory stare ripple down her spine. There's a dull ache behind her eyes that slides down to her shoulder and meets the itching close of the wounds where bullets first ripped into her. Her fingers smell like copper and iron both, scattered over her skin like stray gunpowder, and rust coats her fingernails.

 

Wilson Fisk wants her dead. There was a time when that knowledge would have caused a string of nightmares. Now, all it does is make her _tired_.

 

"What would it take for you to be sure?"

 

She rises to her feet at Ellison's question. Swats his hand away when she sways on her feet momentarily and he rushes to support her. Reaches for the handkerchief she keeps in her top drawer and wraps it around her fingers haphazardly. She's gentler with the card that rests atop the flowers than it deserves. Unfolds it and wishes she had not. Staring up at her in black, cursive, neatly underlined script is a crisp three-word note that makes her stomach swirl.

 

_**For your grave.** _

 

"I am sure _now_ ," she says. Is proud to find that her voice does not shake upon the impact of the words, even when she feels like she is seconds away from throwing up. Sets the card in front of Ellison. Watches him blanch at the neat script on the off-white paper. "We might need to inform Mahoney."

 

"Only if you promise you won't balk at whatever security measures he can think of."

 

Karen makes a face at that. Wrinkles her nose, scrunches up her cheeks, fixes Ellison with her best puppy-dog eyes that have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Her stomach rolls. Flips. She knows better than to keep up the argument.

 

Karen Page _relents_. "You're the boss."

 

*****

 

As it turns out, Brett Mahoney's idea of security measures somehow has come to involve Frank Castle.

 

"You want me to do _what_?" she echoes, staring at the man in disbelief.

 

Brett Mahoney looks as tired as she feels. Dark circles sweep around his eyes and arch over his skin's sallowness that she knows is the result of using copious amounts of caffeine to stay awake. His eyes glitter in the unforgiving office lighting and make it appear as though they are pools of liquid. He blinks rapidly, and some focus returns to his gaze.

 

"Protective custody is not a good idea." Mahoney's face contorts into a look of disgust. "I did some asking around. There was at least one squad car near the location where you were attacked. No word on who had that shift yet, but they were in a position to respond."

 

"And they didn't."

 

"No, they didn't. Instead, the Iron Fist did their job for them."

 

"It's just Iron Fist. Without 'the'." Ellison leans back in her chair. Shrugs at the twin looks of annoyance he receives from both Mahoney and Karen. Regards Mahoney with a rather pensive gaze. "So, what you're saying.. police has been compromised?"

 

Mahoney has the grace to look sheepish. "Strong word, compromised." Karen decides she likes the man when he cracks a nervous smile and actually looks around the room to assure himself that it's just the three of them present within. "I can't put my finger on what's going on, but things have been on a steady race downhill for a long time now. I would use the word 'apathetic' instead of compromised, mind you. People are just done caring."

 

"Apathy comes from feeling powerless. If law enforcement feels that way.."

 

She doesn't finish her sentence. Doesn't have to. Mahoney knows she considers police a half-measure at best, used as she's become to other means of protection, and he acknowledged it when he fast-tracked the permit for her firearm. She sometimes wonders if this is the other side of what heroism creates. When law enforcement feels insufficient, when her first natural instinct is to pick up a weapon instead of a shield, when the death of one vigilante colours the entire city red before the glow of another indomitable spirit encases the vigilante's memory in careful shades of saving grace...

 

Karen Page shudders. "You're essentially saying they would have let me die." Shit, she would've bled out on the floor of that cold and damp alley just south of _Josie's_. Her throat goes dry. The air she inhales scrapes the walls of her lungs like sandpaper. "That's not very... comforting."

 

"Sorry." Mahoney's tone is more of an 'it is what it is' than an outright apology. "I meant what I said, though. Much as I hate it. Castle is your safest bet. And he will face neither arrest nor prosecution if he decides to be that for you." A beat. Then, Mahoney's eyes meet hers unflinchingly. "Be that for you _again_."

 

She can still feel the tip of a gun's muzzle against her chin. Her muscle memory responds to it of its own accord. In her mind, she dissembles the clip from a gun and holds both gun and clip out for him to take over and over and over again. She remembers the look on his face. The anger. The self-loathing. The resignation. Wakes in a cold sweat sometimes, convinced that she has not shielded him enough. Her body is too rail-thin to keep a man like Frank Castle safe from harm, surely, but she spreads herself wide and prays nobody wants him dead more than they want her alive.

 

_Look at you,_ she remembers thinking. Wakes sometimes to the press of his forehead against her own. Wakes alone, but remembers. _Brave and stupid._

 

"If your next words are 'he is retired', Page, then I swear.." Ellison doesn't finish his sentence, but she's heard the threat enough times to make it count. Some days, she's not sure Ellison's gotten over the fact that she neglected to tell him that Frank Castle never actually died. Other days, and she thinks this may very well be one of those, she thinks Ellison's secretly grateful for the continued existence of Frank Castle. "You're not leaving this office until I know you're safe."

 

She doesn't have the heart to scoff at the sentiment. Not when Mahoney keeps eyeing the flowers as though there's a live snake lurking inbetween them that can lunge at any second. Not when Ellison's eyes are more worried than she's ever seen them, with their corners tightening and creasing in thought. Not when she thinks of white flowers on her windowsill back home and a blue ribbon on her bedside table. Not when her body hurts the more she looks at the peonies, not when every bone inside of her feels as though it's being broken and renewed at the same time, not when her blood runs cold in her veins and James Wesley is staring at her from the very corner of the room.

 

She gestures at the card Mahoney is holding between two gloved fingers. Extracts her phone from the mess of paperwork on her desk. Exhales softly until her hand no longer trembles and she can photograph the detail of the card itself. Her fingers don't pause after taking the shot. She types up a quick message underneath it that she knows she's set to regret later.

 

**this came with peonies and dead flowers. am okay, at work, NYPD knows, need a place to lie low**

 

She thinks this is the most fucked-up type of selfish she's ever been.

 

*****

 

"You do realise you have more things to do than babysit me, right?" she gripes at Ellison, not an hour later. "I still know where the door that leads outside is."

 

"Do you really? With the hours you pull in this office, I'd be surprised."

 

"Ha, ha, very funny." Karen wrinkles her nose at him as he smiles beatifically at her. She's secretly grateful for the careful way Ellison helps hold her upright, as her body is screaming at her to lie down and never get back up again, but her gratitude is overshadowed by her worry. She's not certain if any of this is a good idea. Spits her discontent out into bite-sized chunks of annoyance. "I hate _everything_ about this."

 

Thing is, she doesn't think she has a choice.

 

**1hr, black van, side of Bulletin building**

 

Her stomach rebels against the notion of putting Frank in the crosshairs of whatever trouble has landed on her doorstep this time. She already hates herself for proving to Mahoney that she really does have the Punisher on speed-dial (something that had earned her a raised eyebrow) and hates herself that much more for the swiftness with which Frank had replied to her text. It had taken him all of five minutes to respond.

 

_"Is this a Pete Castiglione-thing now?" She hugs herself tightly as gusts of wind ripple through her too-light too-thin coat. Shivers as her back hits the ice-cold railing that winds around the water's edge. "Replying to a text, not five minutes after you've received it?"_

 

_"Life's calm that way," he tells her, mouth curving into one of those half-smiles that are always like he is sharing a secret with only half the world. "Your quest for information about shitty construction sites is the most exciting thing that's happened to me since Curtis informed me he's thinking about redecorating the group space."_

 

_"How's that coming along?"_

 

_"You should see it." He sounds almost proud, nodding decisively at his own words the way he does when he approves of something wholeheartedly. "The garish yellow tones are gone. Curt didn't like your pastel suggestions, though."_

 

_"Curt has no taste," she replies. She barely knows Curtis Hoyle, having met him just twice in the past months, but she feels the man would not mind so terribly to be insulted this way. Knowing his steady friendship with Frank, she's assured that the man would just give as good as he got. "I'll have you know that it's been proven that pastel shades calm the mind and are particularly good for use in therapeutical spaces."_

 

_Frank Castle raises his hands in mock-defense. "Don't shoot the messenger, ma'am," he jokes, acting wounded. "Tell Curt about it next time at group, yeah?"_

 

"Earth to Karen, Earth to Karen, come in please."

 

A brief tap on her nose and an exasperated sigh from Ellison shakes her out of her memory. She offers the man a wan smile that does not quite reach her eyes. She had never taken Frank up on his offer to intersect with group or Curt or anything else within his new life. Supposes that's why it's been months since she saw him last. She doesn't belong in there. There's no place for her in his 'after'. That's as it should be, even when the loss stings.

 

She's not so sure that he would agree with her thoughts.

 

Her stomach loops into knots the closer they get to the rest of the world again. Worsen when Ellison pushes her to rest against the wall as he unlocks the rarely-used door that leads outside. She resists the urge to wrap her arms tightly around herself the way she always seems to around Frank. There's a spring in her step, even through the pain. She tells herself Ellison won't notice. Tells herself things will remain the same from here on out.

 

Karen Page has always been a good liar.

 

Ellison's hand holds her back when he opens the door to the alleyway. It's Ellison who peers out first, keeping the door half-closed and hiding behind it as though nobody on the other side of it would dare attack his seemingly disembodied head. She hears him inhale a sharp, whistling breath.

 

"You here for a delivery?"

 

She blinks at the clipped New York style that suddenly colours Ellison's voice. It's the tone that had been hardest to get used to in this city, used as she was to remnants of French sing-song in the Vermont speech. Hearing it from Ellison now is like watching the man draw himself up to his full height and puff his chest out. There's something inside of him that's trying very hard to push outward in an attempt to dominate and intimidate.

 

"Here to pick some things up, actually."

 

Frank sounds far more relaxed than Ellison looks. Seems amused, even, if the warm inflexion in some syllables is anything to go by. She smiles as Ellison pushes the door slightly more ajar. Limps forward best she can, wishing all the while that she had accepted that crutch they offered at the hospital.

 

A strong arm finds her waist right before the sunlight can strike a match in her hair. She inhales sharp citrus before the scents of gunpowder and motor oil coil around it and constrict it until all that is left is the slightly sour twang on her tongue. His fingertips are warm even through the blouse and jacket she's wearing.

 

"Hi Frank," she breathes into the cold winter air. Raises her eyes to half a smile and soft concern dancing across his brow. Dark eyes trace her face before sweeping down to take stock of her injuries. Her lips lift into a smile of her own. "Good to see you."

 

"Ma'am," he intones, and it's only through this word that she is reminded they are not alone. He has not called her this in a long time. Somehow, over time, he had started to address her by her given name. Once, in danger, it had been 'miss Page' in a way that sent shivers rocketing down her spine in a way that drowned out all the fear. He sounds sharp in warning, now. "It's Pete, don't you remember?"

 

"Cut the crap, Castle," says Ellison tiredly, because he's been on the ground with her far too much to care about the fact that a dead murderer showed up when Karen asked him to, "the name Pete doesn't even suit you. I hope you know that."

 

"Noted, sir." Frank shoots the man a quick grin. There's caution in his eyes, but no concern. Karen thinks she's earned the right to decide who she brings into Frank's orbit to be trusted by now. Frank does not betray that trust, even when his eyes search Ellison's face before nodding just the once. "Thank you for watching her."

 

"I'm not a dog," gripes Karen half-heartedly. Thinks she would sound stronger if she hadn't swayed on her feet in a way that made Frank grip her waist even tighter. She shuts her eyes briefly. Wishes she was stronger, period. Opens her eyes and can't keep the venom off her tongue. "I hate not being able to fend for myself. Just," she exhales noisy disapproval, "look at me, for cryin' out loud!"

 

"I'm looking." Frank steadies her softly. "I got you, ma'am."

 

"You take care of her, you hear?" Karen bites back a smile as Ellison fixes Frank with the same dogged glare he reserves for his trickiest employees. "Don't get her into trouble."

 

"All due respect, sir, think it's her getting me into trouble." Frank grins again. Ducks his head as he says it. It occurs to her that his smile is both genuine and fake, as she can hear the amusement in certain syllables but the actual smile is the broadest she's ever seen from him. It somehow seems foreign on his face. Too foreign, to the point where she is relieved to see it fade and be replaced by a look that holds more gravity. "She's safe with me. Surprised the cops didn't want to do their protective custody bullshit, though."

 

"They think they may be compromised. I'll fill you in later." She casts the little she can see of the alleyway a dark look. "All this ever does is make me feel even more paranoid. Feel like I should wear a disguise or something." The slowly-healing bullet wounds that mar her skin throb in what seems to be agreement. She lets out a soft hiss when electric jolts move through her arm, hot on the heels of the tingling numbness that had set in the more she walked. "We're not walking, are we?"

 

Frank nudges the door further open with his foot. She has to peer around him to actually see much of anything, as he seems hellbent on shielding her from the world outside, but what she sees does not exactly inspire her with a whole lot of confidence.

 

Staring her in the face is a rather dirty-looking, seen-better-days, I-used-to-be-black-but-then-dust-happened van. Dirt coats its exterior to the point where she's certain this van would be a geologist's dream come true. Its side-door is half-ajar, but she can't see much inside beyond a bag and dark cloth. She can barely make out some lettering on the door. Squints at it until some of the jagged script starts to make sense.

 

"Delivery service?" she deciphers, frowning all the while. "That would explain why you smell like you took a bath in spicy food this morning."

 

"Been stayin' in the van. Business technically doesn't exist anymore, but people pay me to deliver the most random shit. Flowers, a couch, a herd of sheep, you name it. Makes a living." He sounds almost pleased about it, as if delivering items to people's doorsteps is part of his greatest life ambition. Doesn't sound like Frank, even, and that makes her guilt all the worse. He's looking anywhere but at her as he continues talking. She spies the nervous twitch of his fingers before he tucks his hands into his coat pockets. "Inside the van is cleaner. Better than it looks." As if she gives a rat's ass about the state of something that could bring her to safety. As if she's not used to the blood and the dirt and the ache that comes with circling around this life he's somehow kept a hold of. "You should, uh... Cover your hair. Hide your face. This guy wants you dead, Karen."

 

"He's not going to get the chance." She echoes his words from long ago back at him. It's hard to believe it's been almost two years since then. Hard to believe they've both survived that long. She always sounds braver than she feels around him. Sounds like she isn't scared out of her mind. Her hand dips into the bag that Ellison's still holding for her. Withdraws a too-warm but very long scarf that she wraps around her face and hair as though she is shielding herself from the cold. Her voice comes out muffled when she turns to Ellison one final time. "Happy Christmas?"

 

"Merry Christmas, Page," affirms the man, having decided earlier that now would be an excellent time to let her use the extra vacation hours she never gets round to using during the year. He holds out the bag for her to take, but actually walks up to the van itself to drop the remainder of her paperwork inside. "Come back with a good story, Page. The world could use one like yours."

 

"Always."

 

She wishes she could smile at him. Settles for squeezing his hand in passing as she finally steps outside and rushes into the back of the van. Breathes out quiet relief when the van's interior smells more like fruit and bread than it does spicy food. Her legs shake and tremble right before she sinks to its floor onto the rather soft mattress that lies behind the driver's seat. Settles herself into the half-dark of Frank's life and prays it's enough to keep death at bay.

 

"Castle." Ellison's voice outside the van is so quiet that she has to strain to hear it. "You take care of her, you hear me? Anything happens to her, you're going to be fish food." She blinks in surprise at that. Sure, she's heard him threaten people. Heard him yell out various versions of 'get this done or else!' that everybody jumped into action over. Heard him issue ridiculous threats like 'no bakesale cookies for you'. Never a threat that ended in death. "I don't give a shit who the hell you are, son. You may have this whole city spooked, but not me. No, sir, not me." _That's_ Ellison, through and through, defying danger by drawing himself up to his full height and telling it off with certainty in his voice, and Karen smirks when she hears Frank's audible intake of breath. "You hurt her, get her hurt, _whatever_ – I will find you and that will be that. You understand?"

 

"Yessir."

 

*****

 

"Counselor didn't say it was this bad," is the first thing Frank says to her.

 

It's been at least ten minutes since they drove away from the Bulletin. Long minutes of nothing but the radio softly playing an unfathomable blend of rock and slow country songs that make her feel as though she's further south than she's ever been in her life. Long moments of his fingers drumming a soft pace on the steering wheel in a rhythm that sounds nothing like gunfire at all. She has been staring off into space all this time, curled up on his mattress, back resting against the back of his seat.

 

It takes a second before her thoughts catch up with what he's saying. "You spoke to Foggy?" she asks, confused, because certainly she would have known this if that had happened. "When?"

 

"Came to see you. Hospital. Counselor thought I was being an idiot."

 

"You were," she affirms none-too-gently, even when her heart soars and thrills with new warmth at the confession. "Your rise from the dead is less than a year ago. The little information that trickled out about your involvement in the goings-on at the park was enough to inspire countless internet sleuths to go digging for more." Hell, she's had to fend off well-meaning concerned citizens and obsessed researchers both in the past few months. Frank Castle triggers a hunting instinct within many. She's tired of catering to the tame wolves that think giving him chase will satisfy the dying wild within them. "You can't just... turn up in hospital. Not even for me." She spits the last out with more bitterness than the blackest coffee she brews. " _Especially_ not for me."

 

"You got hurt." He says it so simply, as though he is addressing the weather (cloudy with a spot of rain) or something else that's easy and natural. "Karen. I had to."

 

"No, you didn't. You _wanted_ to. That's different."

 

He grunts something that might have been an affirmation, but doesn't elaborate beyond that. She shifts on the mattress. Groans out discomfort when her ribs protest at the movement and her arm doesn't cooperate well enough. She's careful to keep her head down, but damn it all to hell she cannot talk to him without seeing at least a small part of his face. She's convinced the past few weeks have pitched her into a full-blown fever dream. It only makes perfect sense that Frank would be a part of that, too. She has to see him. Has to know he's real and not just a disembodied voice snaking its way into her thoughts the way voices always do when she gets too lonely.

 

"You still have no idea who did this to you?" His voice is sharp. Coloured with something so dark that she feels she's staring into the face of the blackest night the longer she looks at him. Dimly, she wonders if this is the last his victims see. Just dark twinging with the copper fuel of blood, hosted by pinpricks of cold light in his gaze. "Jesus, Karen. You look.." He huffs out a breath. Sounds like a disgruntled animal for a moment before his hand leaves the steering wheel and reaches for her blindly. "I'm sorry."

 

She blinks. "Not your fault," she responds immediately. Sighs when his hand finds a stray lock of her hair and loops around it before brushing her cheek. "Not your responsibility." They've been down this road before. She knows he considers her safety something that lands square on his shoulders, even when he takes care to involve her in all his attempts to safeguard her life. It doesn't stop her from arguing back at him. Doesn't stop her from telling him he's being an idiot. "I have some idea of who's behind this. Nothing I can prove. Nothing that would hold up in court or anything like that. But.. you ever have that sense that a threat is coming from a very specific direction, even when that direction seems clear when you look at it?"

 

"Yeah. That's war. You learn to navigate that shit, squash the sense of clearness in favour of the paranoia, things like that." His accent lilts at the words and makes the words jagged in his mouth. "Listen to it. Saves your life if you do." He laughs, then, and the sound of it is foreign for a moment. "Shit, Kar, you've been doing that already. You just keep on doing it. Keep fighting what feels normal in favour of what feels off. You'll figure it out."

 

Kar. The way he'd said it, it had sounded like _care_. It sounded soft. Wanting. She wonders if he said it before, somehow, when she was not around to hear it. Wonders if he's toyed with the sound of her name the way his name always is a ghost on her lips in the early morning when she wakes and remains the last of her thoughts before she collapses into sleep. Wonders if he sounds so trusting, so _sure_ of her, because he makes her name sound like the kind of peace neither one of them ever feels.

 

"I think it's Wilson Fisk," she says idly, upsetting the modicum of peace with the angry fight that's coiling in the remnants of her fists. "Think he wants me dead."

 

He goes perfectly still behind the steering wheel.

 

"I know you saw him. In jail. I know he gave you information. Access to it, anyway." She shrugs. Doesn't care that his jaw tightens and betrays an angry pulse brewing just underneath his skin. She's always been adept at solving puzzles, and Frank Castle's continued existence on this planet is the least surprising of them all. "I know you know what he is capable of. I think he is still dangerous even when he is behind bars. I think he.. seeks vengeance."

 

_Not like you,_ she wants to say, because it matters that Frank's vengeance is dark and alive beneath her skin while Fisk's is poison in her veins. _It's not anything like your retribution._ His, she knows. Knows it as well as she does all the other things that keep her awake until the early hours of the morning. His, she doesn't mind.

 

"Vengeance for what?"

 

His voice is hoarse. Rough with disuse, even when it hasn't been that long since he last spoke. His fingers clench around the steering wheel. His other hand finds her shaking fingers. Squeezes down on them none-too-gently, warm and present as he is, and holds them steady even when the road takes them into a few rather sharp turns. His one-handed steering makes her more nervous than the look he gives her in the rear-view mirror.

 

James Wesley sits next to her, quiet, eyes glittering behind his glasses, red staining his crisp white shirt. She cannot tell if there is accusation in his gaze. All things considered, she never really knew him well enough to discern that about him at all. She knows she should feel guilty. All she feels is an empty kind of certainty that's all the worse. The loss of human life shouldn't feel like a void of indifference, but it does. Oh, it _does_.

 

"For putting him behind bars," she says, not wanting the black hole of James Wesley's existence to overpower her at her lowest. She fixes a wary but determined gaze on the keychain that dangles from the ignition. It's not a lie, not really. She tells herself this even as her stomach protests and bile rises in the back of her throat. She swallows thickly. "I'm the easy target. Foggy's protected at his law firm. Matt's.. well... Matt's dead. Can't take a dead man to task." She doesn't mean for it to sound this damn bitter. Doesn't mean for it to sound _hurt_. "Fisk has the means and motive. It has to be him."

 

"Okay," he says. His mouth curves into harsh lines and hard edges as he speaks. "We'll figure it out."

 

"You believe me, don't you?"

 

"Just making sure," he says, in the same hushed tone she's sure he reserves for coaxing the fight out of a rabid animal. His gaze fixes on the horizon. "We have to be sure."

 

*****

 

Frank's idea of _making_ _sure_ turns out to be something she didn't see coming at all.

 

She frowns as she takes in the too-normal, too-families-with-young-children neighbourhood Frank steers the van into. She's migrated to the front seat now that they're away from the skyscrapers and crowdedness of the inner city. After all, she never ventures into the city's outskirts much if she can help it. This deviation in her everyday routine makes it far less likely that any of Fisk's hired muscle will find her.

 

Her throat burns the further they wind into the terrain of neatly-clipped hedges and basketball hoops on garage ports. She folds her fingers into her scarf. Busies herself with ironing non-existent wrinkles out of its fabric. This is hard on her. Doesn't know how Frank's still breathing, let alone driving, when this sort of space makes his loss stand out even more starkly. His family home could have fit in one of these streets with ease. She'd intruded on it back then despite her own family home haunting her every footstep. Doesn't know if she'll have the strength to set foot in one again now, unless it's a matter of life-or-death importance she doesn't fathom quite yet.

 

For half a moment, she thinks Frank's intent is to lose her attackers in the maze of normalcy. To set them on the wrong foot and then whisk her off to something far more safe and remote than an everybody-knows-everybody part of town like this one. She thinks she'd prefer that, all things considered, to whatever stupid plan he's concocted now.

 

"This is a bad idea," he says suddenly. Stops the van neatly next to the curb beneath a huge tree she's certain is the only remnant of the time this space used to be open fields and woodlands. His eyes are far away and unfocused. "Shouldn't have.." He shakes his head. Frowns and sets his jaw in a line she's come to recognise as stubborn. His finger twitches on the steering wheel. "Shouldn't be doing this."

 

"Shouldn't be doing _what_?"

 

Frank's gaze settles on the house on the other side of the street. It's no different from the other houses on this block: white wood and sparingly used red brick exterior all over, dark green door and windowpanes standing out from it even in the sunset gleam that streaks over the front lawn, a brick path leading up to a few steps and a small porch. Twinkling lights ( _fairy lights_ , Kevin always called them, and her heart constricts at the thought) sprawl out in the shrubbery and spiral around the porch. She smiles when her eyes set on the _hanukkiah_ that sits on the windowsill, all nine candles lit, and on the decorated fir branches that extend on either side of it.

 

It looks so perfectly normal.

 

"Shouldn't be bringing this to their doorstep," Frank says quietly, his eyes never leaving the rather ugly Santa and a decrepit reindeer that stand in the centre of the house's front lawn. His eyes glisten as he scrapes his throat. "They've done enough. Dealt with enough." He lets out a shuddering breath. Sneers out the next words as though they have personally offended him. "It's the last day of Hanukkah, for cryin' out loud. Gonna be Christmas real soon. Happy _fucking_ holidays."

 

She means to offer him consoling words and understanding. Has already put a hand on his arm, pressing down gently when she feels his muscles tighten under her touch. Her mouth is halfway open and she's certain whatever she wanted to say would have been soft in the air between them. She closes it abruptly. All the words die in her throat when she looks out the window again.

 

The dark green door has opened, and beyond it lies a golden glow that is probably the result of entirely too many holiday decorations. She thinks she spots some kind of singing monstrosity (seriously, what _is_ that thing?) near the barely visible staircase, but it's not that which has her frowning at the door.

 

Standing on the porch, mostly illuminated by a silly-looking light-up Santa hat that's perched precariously on flyaway curly hair, is a man she only knows from one blurry photograph she dug up out of a rather shady-looking website at the end of a long Google search.

 

"Frank," she says. Doesn't know if she says his name in warning or in careful joy. Thinks it may be a little bit of both. "Look."

 

A storm brews beneath her fingertips as he tracks her gaze to where the man is standing. His muscles coil and relax under her hand, and his fingers slip toward the van's ignition almost involuntarily. His eyes flicker in the light as a war crosses his face in half-shadows. His breath comes out jagged and restless, as if he has just run a marathon within the last minute. She thinks maybe that's the speed of his thoughts, because his hand coils around the van's keys and makes as if to turn them and drive away.

 

She's out of the van before she knows good and well what she's doing. Almost doubles over when the sudden movement has her ribcage protesting furiously. Figures that Frank's not going to drive away and leave her stranded in suburbia by herself, though, which is worth all the ache that shoots through her body when she actually steps closer to the house.

 

The man rushes out to meet her, Santa hat dancing around his head furiously, and she is glad for it when she sways on her feet just a moment. Nausea flits through her stomach anxiously, joining the battle her head has been waging on her for the past couple of days, but she exhales the worst of it expertly just as the man's hands find her arms and steady her on her feet. He releases her the second she's steady again, though his brow remains furrowed and his eyes darken in concern when she raises her own to meet them.

 

"Hi, I'm Karen," she says, extending her hand to him, at the same time the man offers up a "David Lieberman" and extends a hand of his own to her.

 

"I know," they say simultaneously, and she finds herself smiling back at him when he lets out a delighted laugh and claps his hands in excitement before shaking her outstretched hand vigorously.

 

"Wow, this is rather weird, huh?" He tugs at the Santa hat atop his head and offers her a sheepish smile. "Gotta say, this isn't how I expected this evening to go... I saw you guys pull up. Knew there's only one man who'd drive a van as ugly as that one."

 

"God, yeah, I know, it looks terrible," she replies, wrinkling her nose as her mouth curves into another broad smile. Something about David Lieberman speaks joyful exuberance that is almost infectious in nature. She shakes her head slightly. Tries to reconcile the man before her with the hacker who had spooked Frank so terribly. Fails utterly when he offers her another goofy smile and finds herself expressing genuine appreciation for their meeting instead. "It's nice to finally meet you, though."

 

"You as well, Miss Page," he says, and she would swear up and down that she detects a tiny smirk tugging at his lips before his attention diverts to something behind her. That something, of course, turns out to be Frank. "I'd say 'look what the cat dragged in', but I have it on good authority that you're still allergic to any and all cats?"

 

"Lieberman," grunts Frank, audibly dragging his feet the closer he gets to them. "Shouldn't have come here. Gonna get gone again."

 

"Yeeeah, well, here you are." David shakes his head. "You might as well come in. We were just about to start dinner."

 

"We ca–"

 

What sounds like Frank's immediate refusal is cut short by the appearance of a slender woman in the doorway behind David. This woman, Karen _does_ recognise from the few social media posts she was able to locate in her hunt for information on Micro. Sarah Lieberman is all kind eyes and gentle gestures, even when she is currently frowning down at them and mouthing "Pete?" incredulously before rushing down the steps to greet them.

 

"Oh my god, I can't believe it!" Sarah holds Frank at arm's length for just a moment, smiling up at him and shaking her head as though she is desperately trying to keep her tears at bay. "What are you doing here? It's about time you showed up!"

 

Karen feels laughter bubble forth in her chest and belly at the sight of a rather skittish Frank being roped into a Lieberman family hug, with Sarah all-but-collapsing against him and David wrapping his arms around both Frank and his wife. She lets out a snort of appreciative laughter, wiping a stray tear away from her cheek when Frank begrudgingly squeezes the Liebermans closer to him for a brief moment. Whatever transpired between him and this family has made them close. Close enough for their presence to hurt almost as much as their absence, if the expression on his face is anything to go by.

 

She wishes she could take a photo and freeze this moment in time on his behalf.

 

"Oh!" Sarah's exclamation as her eyes land on Karen could have been comical, if not for the fact that the woman is now smiling at her in a too-knowing way and Frank's determinedly looking anywhere but at them. "Hi! So sorry," Sarah apologises with a laugh as she extracts herself from the embrace, "I got a little wrapped up here. I'm Sarah."

 

"Karen Page," offers Karen, finding herself smiling back at the woman involuntarily. "Nice to meet you."

 

A look passes between Frank and Sarah that Karen can't quite identify. Frank raises his eyes skyward for a moment as Sarah's smile curves into glee and her hand wraps around Karen's to give it a quick squeeze of appreciation. She finds herself squeezing back, calloused fingers wrapping around Sarah's softer hands expertly, instinctively trusting that the other woman somehow has her best interests at heart. She hasn't felt this way since Dinah Madani last invaded her personal space to ensure that Karen, too, would not spill the beans about Kandahar and the CIA's worst. (She thinks she probably looks as bad now as Madani did back then, though Madani had been adamant that she rolled out of her battle none the worse for wear somehow. Karen had not dared to inquire further.)

 

"Are you all right?" asks Sarah softly, eyes creasing in concern as the sun's last rays streak across the lawn. Her eyes land on Karen's injuries and Karen is pretty damn sure there's not a lot one can hide from the woman when her eyes also find the battered ribs and the useless shoulder expertly. "What happened to you? Do you want to talk about it?"

 

David casts a furtive look around the area. "Take those questions inside," he warns his wife, eyes landing on distant neighbouring houses and Frank's battered van. "Whatever it is has all the makings of a shitstorm. Besides, it looks like Karen could do with a comfy chair and some food."

 

"Wouldn't say no to that," affirms Karen hesitantly, eyes shifting over to Frank's perfectly still form. She frowns when he determinedly looks down at the ground as though he is waiting on the grass to grow. Finds herself echoing David's sentiment. "We're here now."

 

His eyes do meet hers at that.

 

"Mom! Mom!" Panicked shrieks rise from the house and edge their way closer to the front door. A girl's voice, by the sound of it, though there is a background noise that might be another voice joining the fearful chorus. "Moooooom! The chicken is on fire!"

 

"The chicken is on what now?" asks David bemusedly, just as Sarah's eyes widen and she sprints across the lawn and into the house at breakneck speed. "Did she just.."

 

A dry sort of chuckle escapes Frank at that. "Now I'm almost sorry I missed Thanksgiving dinner last year. Think, uh, think you might want to go check on your wife there, Lieberman."

 

"Only if you don't leave." David's jaw locks into petulance. "I'm done with you leaving."

 

"I'll make him stay."

 

Karen's assurance flits out into the dusk before she has any hopes of stopping it. She's not sure if she is being truthful. Isn't sure she can make Frank do anything, not when his eyes are dark and his shoulders slope forward as though he wants to do nothing more than curl in on himself on this front lawn in an achingly familiar neighbourhood. She tucks her hands into her jacket's pockets and clenches them into fists so tightly that her nails dig into her skin. Silently dares Frank to walk away.

 

He stays.

 

*****

 

"What happened to _you_?"

 

Zach Lieberman is all wrinkled nose and dismay as he gives Karen the once-over. She has just shrugged out of her coat in an ordeal that lasted at least a minute before Frank's gentle hands found her shoulder and expertly tugged the fabric over the tightly-wrapped injuries. Karen lets out a sharp laugh as Frank fixes the youngest Lieberman child with a withering stare.

 

"Bad people happened to me," she explains succinctly. Isn't sure if she's saying it for Zach's benefit alone, because David's ears have visibly perked up at the exchange and Sarah's head pokes out from the doorway that she assumes leads to the kitchen. Decides to make the explanation as brief as possible while still remaining within the realms of the truth. "I got shot and beaten up about a week ago. Takes time to heal."

 

"You got lucky." David's bright blue eyes are calm as he offers her an affirmation that does not sound questioning in the slightest. It feels to her as though he has already categorised most of her injuries within the short span of time she's known him. Isn't sure whether she likes that perceptiveness or not, but is relieved to find that even David Lieberman doesn't know everything. He misses the mark completely when he jerks his thumb into Frank's general direction and asks a follow-up. "Those bad people, uhh.. anything to do with him?"

 

"No, nothing like that. They're tied to my old job, probably? I used to be a–"

 

"Secretary to Nelson and Murdock who singlehandedly talked a mass-murdering vigilante through his trial."

 

"Right."

 

"Lieberman," Frank says, again, and this time the use of David's last name sounds much more like a warning than the last, "what did I say about digging into stuff you shouldn't?"

 

David Lieberman elects to ignore the way Frank's eyes flicker in the light of the many holiday decorations and seem to grow dimmer as his voice darkens. It seems like a well-practiced thing between them, born of a time spent in close company to one another, and not for the first time since their arrival Karen finds herself wondering just how Frank's life shaped itself around that of the Liebermans this way.

 

"To be fair," she says, coming to David's rescue after giving it only a moment of thought, "that is pretty much common knowledge. Think most of New York followed your trial and it was all over the news." She gives a half-shrug and winces when her shoulder protests. "You _did_ say David had been watching you before he reached out to you, so it makes sense he knows about me too."

 

'That's really kind of creepy, dad," complains the girl who just appeared in the kitchen's doorway. She throws Karen the most glittering smile, cheeky and warm, before she spots Frank's still form standing next to what Karen's inexplicably had to identify as nothing other than a stuffed ostrich wearing a Christmas hat. The girl stops dead in her tracks. "Pete?"

 

"Hi, kid." Frank shifts on his feet. His answering smile is so cautious that it only tugs at the corners of his mouth a little bit. There is hesitance in his gaze. "Uhm, happy Hanukkah?"

 

The girl looks him up and down for a moment before nodding decisively. "Good, you can fix our garbage disposal unit. Zach broke it yesterday when he threw his report card into it."

 

"No, I didn't! Mom put too many potatoes into it!"

 

"We didn't even eat potatoes yesterday," shoots the girl back, tossing her long braided hair over her shoulder imperiously, "and we _all_ saw you try to shred your bad grades."

 

"Leo, that's enough!"

 

"Mom, he's _lying_!"

 

"Both of you, in the kitchen, right now." Sarah's voice drops into a dangerous hiss that Karen immediately recognises. She thinks there must be some kind of universal language that all mothers learn. Wonders if it's the same for animals, or if it's something beholden to humans only. Hides a smile when both of the kids trudge back over to the kitchen with twin expressions of dislike written all over their faces. "And you can't rope Pete into fixing that for us, honey."

 

"Dad's slow as shit with that stuff," sulks Zach, apparently agreeing with his sister that Frank is the safer bet when it comes to fixing the broken equipment. "He even said you should buy a new lawnmower when the old one broke three months ago."

 

David shrugs, even as a slender hand extends toward Zach and pulls him into the kitchen abruptly. "He's not wrong," admits the man in hushed tones, casting a furtive glance at both the kitchen and Frank, "but that lawnmower really _is_ busted because the neighbour's cat somehow managed to chase a mouse into it. Carnage on the lawn, looked like a goddamn Tarantino movie."

 

"I'd be more worried about that shredded report card, if I were you."

 

"Yeah, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

 

"Any idea why he shredded it?" asks Karen, limping further into the living space that houses all manner of holiday decorations. "Ashamed of his grades?"

 

"No clue. He's been.. easier and harder to deal with since I got back." David's eyes shine suspiciously bright before he turns to face her. "He acts out less, believe it or not. But he keeps secrets. Suppose I can't fault him on that, with all I've done to keep us safe."

 

"Maybe not," she shrugs, ""but sounds to me like you should be the expert at sharing with him why keeping secrets isn't always a good idea."

 

She leaves out the important parts in her speech. Thinks if she focuses on the secrets of the Lieberman family, she won't feel so compelled to examine her own. Thinks if she mentions only David Lieberman's fight with the truth, she won't have to speak about her own battle and Frank's war.

 

Vermont encroaches on her in her periphery and blackens the edges of her vision with cold rooms and bloodied pages of text. She breathes out in a sharp puff of noise and shakes her head. The scent of fire shakes loose from her a little too reluctantly for her tastes. It's always hardest this time of year somehow. Being with a family again is even harder, used as she is to being on her own, used as she is to the dark that awaits her in December.

 

The Lieberman household is filled with more light than she can bear.

 

"Do you, uh, need any help? With the food?"

 

She wonders how Frank can be so normal in this space. Wonders how it is that his voice only halts a moment before strengthening loudly enough for Sarah to hear him and reply with a refusal. He seems at ease in this moment, stepping closer to the kitchen, dropping a haphazardly wrapped box onto the coffee table as he passes it. Ghosts don't haunt his certain footsteps the way they do her halting steps.

 

She steps closer to the kitchen, too, because David Lieberman's gaze is far too knowing and she doesn't think she wants to be alone in a room with the man when his eyes pierce through the haze of her thoughts a little too easily. Him knowing who she is does not disconcert her. She's public knowledge now, having dipped her toes into the pool of investigative journalism with some modicum of success. But the look he levels at her is something else entirely, born of something far deeper than just an appreciation for the work she's done, and she thinks he can see all of Vermont's winter in her own gaze if she doesn't break away right now.

 

So she walks into the kitchen, steadying herself on the furniture and against the wall as she goes, and prays it'll be enough to keep the dark at bay.

 

*****

 

Leo Lieberman has far too much of her father inside of her.

 

That is the conclusion Karen arrives at, anyway, when the girl's gaze lands on her over dinner and doesn't look away from her again. Admittedly, it's Karen's admission that she's a journalist that first draws Leo's attention in earnest. She learns that Sarah did a minor in English almost simultaneously with her own admission, though the other woman admits to possessing far too much shyness to ever be successful at interviewing complete strangers. Karen makes the mistake of saying she never attended a day of college, flippantly, carelessly, because there is something about this damn family that makes her let her guard down even against her better judgment.

 

"If you never went, then how come you work for a newspaper? Don't you need, like, a degree for that? Like you need to do journalism in school first and then you have to do internships and then you get hired, maybe?"

 

"I kinda just, uh, rolled into it?" Karen shrugs and nibbles carefully at one of the parts of the chicken that didn't turn out hopelessly singed. "I used to do administrative work for the most part? Took a typing course back in high school and did some low-level secretarial stuff in the past, so that usually was enough to get my foot in the door somewhere." A job that's a dime a dozen, in and out the door on whims and necessities, and nobody to remember her face or name after she's gone. She never stops long enough to really miss it, though the thought of blissful anonymity tugs at her for a moment with a tendril of longing. "Didn't start doing journalistic work until I started working for a law firm that needed a lot of legwork done on background research. Law firm eventually dissolved, but I guess the research stuck."

 

Matt and Foggy, bless them, had been utterly clueless _idiots_ at times. Forget winning in a courtroom when the readily available information is incomplete and witnesses can turn over a new leaf at any moment's notice. She's no stranger to having shit go belly-up in court, so badly that justice itself seems to hang her head in shame over how things ended. She couldn't afford to have that happen a second time. The indignance of it, the injustice of things, the stories of people to whom bad things had happened and the lack of accountability from those responsible... She can't look away from that. Can't look away even when Foggy's turned wholly corporate and Matt's... Matt's a goddamn dead _hypocrite_.

 

She stabs her peas with a little more force than is strictly necessary.

 

"So, you just got hired at a newspaper? That's lucky," says Sarah, shooting her daughter a warning look as the girl also opens her mouth to undoubtedly shoot off a million more questions. "Must be more interesting than legal stuff."

 

"Oh yeah, for sure," she nods, giving the woman a thumbs-up over the loveliness that's rosemary-flavoured mashed potatoes and applesauce-covered _latkes_. "I basically got hired after the legwork I did on.. well.." She trails off, uncertain if she should mention the extent of it in present company. Frank's trial isn't exactly proper dinner conversation.

 

"After all the time she spent going over my case," rumbles Frank, next to her, staring down at his plate as though it's the most interesting thing in the world, seemingly not caring about the fact that he reminds everyone at the table of the godawful things he has done. There is a faint note of pride in his words as he continues to speak. "She dove into their archives for more information and impressed them with what she uncovered. Did some guest pieces first before getting hired onto the regular staff." He scrapes his throat. "Kept me sane in the meantime. We wouldn't be sitting here right now if it wasn't for her."

 

She knows for sure that she has never told him about how exactly she managed to get herself hired at the Bulletin. She knows she didn't start doing the guest pieces until after that night in the woods with Schoonover, either, so that leaves only the possibility that he has somehow managed to keep tabs on her all this time. Sneaks a sideways glance at him when that thought hits her, eyebrow raised skyward, but he is studiously avoiding her gaze by now. Goddamn. _Frank_ , she thinks, exasperated and touched all at once, _how come you never tell me these things?_ She wishes he could read her mind. Wants to wrap him in a hug so tight he won't know what's hit him. Brushes off the rest of what he has said, because without Frank they would never have made it here to this table at all.

 

"I didn't do that much," she says, shrugging lightly, trying to forget the fact that she broke into a house much like this one because she got a little too curious about Frank's side of the story. "I just felt I couldn't let it go. Too much injustice."

 

David makes a noise of assent in the back of his throat at that. From what Frank told her, after, and from what Madani circumvented telling her, David's hunt for the truth took him away from his family. She's been told that the curly-haired man cannot abide injustice and manipulates the truth until all the lies have been exposed. A hacker with deep-seated morals and convictions that Madani was not sure she should praise. Frank had been pensive about it all. Curtis Hoyle, bless him, had stated David Lieberman was the only reason why Frank was still alive.

 

That doesn't stop Frank from laying all praise down at her feet instead.

 

She catches his furtive glance at her out of the corner of her eye. "She helped me remember," he says quietly, meeting Sarah's inquisitive look head-on. "It's like we talked about last year. Some things just slip through your fingers until you've got something that helps you hold on." He scrapes his throat. Quirks a smile when his eyes land on the bottle of rosé. "I blame that shit for what I've just said, mind you."

 

"It really is strong stuff," agrees David. Rosé swirls in his own glass as he takes a sip and then sets it back down abruptly. "Too bad we already did a Hanukkah toast earlier. Could've added some stuff in."

 

"To all the stuff we forgot to mention, then," says Karen, raising her own glass of sparkling fruit-flavoured water. She looks around the table. Feels her throat go dry when she thinks _family_ at the sight of the people gathered around it. Amends her speech. "And to finally being together."

 

"About damn time, too."

 

"Yeah, about time Pete didn't bail on us again." Leo sniggers and sends Frank a totally exaggerated wink from across the table. "What's in the present you got us?"

 

"A mousetrap."

 

"A box of tiny _sufganiyot_."

 

"The _Life of Pi_ movie."

 

"Candlesticks."

 

"Flowers."

 

"In a box?"

 

"Who puts mousetraps in a box, David? Nobody."

 

"I still say it's food." Zach licks his fingers and rolls his eyes. "We already have a gazillion copies of that movie."

 

"Two," rebuffs Leo, indignant. "And Frank likes the book."

 

"I read the book too, you know."

 

"Yeah but dad, you like anything that has a tiger in it."

 

"Not sports teams I don't," warns David. "A mousetrap is practical, yeah?"

 

"It's a holiday decoration," knows Karen. She's seen Frank pick it up from the gas station store they stopped at before driving here. "Holly and ivy."

 

"See, flowers!" crows Sarah happily.

 

"Technically, they're not flowers."

 

"Kid, if your mom says they're flowers, they probably are," says Frank tiredly, rolling his eyes ceilingward when Zach starts shaking his head vigorously. "But yeah, it's holly and ivy and some acorns. Couldn't turn up entirely empty-handed on Hanukkah, yeah?"

 

"Mom, this is _totally_ like that story," says Leo suddenly, eyes alight with something that Frank and David both let out a groan at seeing. "Do you remember? The one you made up for Zach and me? The kings of holly and ivy?"

 

Zach, too, perks up at her words. "The Winter King!" he announces excitedly, peas and mashed potatoes already lying forgotten on his plate. He gestures with his fork as he recites the start of what sounds to be a fairytale. "Once upon a time, in the future of days long past, there lived a king at summer's end. He was crowned in holly and berry, and winter followed in his wake."

 

"The king stepped into midnight, and no light shone from his darkened eyes. In shackles and chains he did battle; the earth cloaked in snow he did defend." Leo's recitation is faster-paced, evoking urgency in every word. "Blades he crossed with stars and oak unmoving, until his age crumbled his shield and the ice melted at the sight of a new face. The sun rose after his shortest night, and the king lay defeated within the lake."

 

"In his stead came acorn and first spring, moving the light forward into open sky," nods Sarah gently, and her eyes never leave Karen's. She means to look away from the openness in the woman's gaze, but finds herself anchored to the kindness within them. "A king was crowned anew, a king whose love was true. He saw a maiden of spun gold and sought to claim her, and she did not his passage deny."

 

"Immortal was the king of winter, and now there stood summer's king on the longest day. Ivy crawled forth over his bosom, while the stars sought their midnight station by the blade." David shakes his head as he speaks the words, but it is from him that they sound as though they could very well be true. "Night struck true, night struck last. Out the lake rose the king of winter, onto the shore he did wade."

 

"Summer fell defeated, and with it winter rose anew," smiles Leo, "but the maiden gold remained in darkness too. Older she'd become, wiser still, and the king knelt before her in a silent plea. _Take my life from me_ , he begged her, immortal as he were, and the woman brushed his cheek and told him _living is not such a tragedy_."

 

"He died within her arms of sunlight, and rose again the next morn," confirms Zach, winding down somberly, "picking up the sword anew and claiming to have been reborn."

 

A shiver trails down Karen's spine as the words die down and the table goes quiet. There is something in this story that sounds old and familiar, tugging at her mind's periphery and demanding she pay attention, but she can't say how it fits in with anything they were talking about before. She opens her mouth as if to deny its worth to her, but the words die on her lips and she finds herself shaking her head slowly instead.

 

Frank seems to be faring no better. He has huffed out a series of breaths that almost sound as if he's gearing up to fight and release a battle roar from deep within his chest. His eyes are glassy for a moment, but then her hand finds his under the table and she squeezes down gently until the faraway look strays away from them once more. His hand tangles in hers so firmly that it almost hurts. He doesn't let go, and that alone tells her the story spooked him the way it unsettled her as well.

 

"God, you must think we're the strangest family," laughs Sarah weakly, her hand curling around the bottle of rosé as if she, too, needs something to steady herself with. "I wrote it a long time ago. Based it off older legends, mostly European ones. It's the only thing my useless study was ever good for." The woman's nose-wrinkle and self-deprecation endear her to Karen further. "We only really share it when someone needs to hear it. Apparently, tonight that was the two of you."

 

"Reminds me of my family's stories over celebratory dinners like this one," she admits quietly. "Some of them were much like this too. Only darker." Her father had seen to that. Had wanted to weed out the weak in his children that way. For a moment, her jaw tightens at the thought. "It's not strange to me."

 

"Why does it not surprise me that the Page family is all about dark fairytales?"

 

Something about David's question, wry and almost callous-sounding, makes her blood run cold. She rises from her seat before she knows good and well what she's doing. Stumbles away from the plate of food that suddenly seems unappetising.

 

_He knows, he knows, he knows._

 

It sings through her body. Follows her even as she turns and walks outside as fast as her legs can carry her. The cold bites and nips at her skin, jacketless as she is, but she hardly feels its snappish tugging. Dimly, behind her, she can hear a commotion rising from the table she just abandoned. She leaves the door open. Wants to hear the fall-out, because she was born petty like that and she is far too curious for her own damn good.

 

"Ow! Frank! Jesus!"

 

_W_ _orth it,_ she thinks viciously as David's shout of pain reaches her.

 

"Lieberman. What. The. Fuck." Frank's angry growl makes her hair stand on end. She leans against the cool woodwork of the Lieberman house and listens to the hush that halts the moment of chaos in its tracks. "The hell was that? The hell did you _do_?"

 

" _Someone_ had to make sure we were safe. You almost compromised us once, your judgment isn't always free of sentiment, and I'd be damned if I let you mess this up." David sounds positively indignant and more than a little bit hurt if his slightly muffled voice is anything to go by. "So, yeah, I looked her up. Same way I did everybody else you claimed you trusted. I knew she was on your side the second I read about her. Knew there was no way she'd breach that trust, because she's not that kind of person. She's good where it counts, Frank."

 

She lets out a rattling breath at that. Understands for the first time how dangerous the unassuming man seated at the head of the table within a light-filled house truly is. Knows now that he didn't just see _her_ , earlier, standing there on his front lawn, all-but-stumbling into his arms because of her injuries. He saw all her history with it, too. All the things she's compartmentalised and hidden away.

 

Karen lets out a shuddering breath.

 

It doesn't take long for Frank to walk outside and come to rest beside her. His breath is hot in the air and angry in his chest. The air around them is so quiet that she's almost certain she can hear the soft thudding of his heart next to her. Her hand loops around his wrist almost unthinkingly. She needs this. She needs to hold on to something.

 

She doesn't know what it says about either of them that he lets her.

 

*****

 

David Lieberman is quick to apologise. She can sense the sincerity that lurks behind his words and knows he weighs every syllable in a way that makes it count. It comes out just a little more strangled than usual, with a fast-darkening bruise colouring his jaw better than any beard would. She decides he looks rather comical with a frozen pack of fish fingers pressed up against his face and the faded red of Sarah's lipstick smeared across his brow from where she last kissed him.

 

It goes a long way to warm her to him anew, but she's not so stupid as to _trust_ him.

 

Frank has no such qualms about the man. They're midway through a tabletop game that Karen's pretty sure is geared toward children, their momentary altercation over dinner already forgotten between them, while Leo attempts to play guitar at the kitchen counter and Sarah's watching Zach shoot hoops outside with his newly acquired basketball. Karen's grateful for the fact that neither Frank nor David are the quiet kind of gamers. Their noise levels drown out the steady thumping of the basketball that haunts entirely too many of her dreams.

 

"You still haven't said what brought you here," remarks David casually as another five-dollar bill disappears in his pocket when Frank concedes defeat. "Not that this isn't nice, because it is, and I'm glad you're not risking botulism anymore.."

 

"Botulism?" she asks, looking back and forth between the men as though she can deduce an explanation from their expressions alone.

 

"Long story."

 

"He eats food straight out of a can," says David, gesturing at Frank empathically, "even when it should be heated first."

 

"Apparently not that long."

 

"You do know that's bad for you, right?" she asks, wrinkling her nose at Frank's callous shrug. "God, Frank, that's disgusting."

 

" _Thank_ you." David smiles, victorious, the game's spinner already lying forgotten on the table between them. Sobers up abruptly when he gives Karen the once-over. "Not that I didn't like meeting you, because I think we were long overdue, but you looking beaten-up like that has me thinking you came here for more than just way too much Hanukkah food for one family to devour alone."

 

"Could use an extra pair of eyes," says Frank. "Kar thinks that Wilson Fisk may have something to do with the attack on her. Anything you can drag up would be worthwhile." He pauses. Fixes David with a firm look. Wholly ignores the way the man's eyes widen at the abbreviation of Karen's name. "Nothing that can land you or them in trouble, you hear me? No putting yourself in the crossfire again."

 

David's laugh sounds hollow. "Wilson Fisk is a big fish. There'll be plenty to drag up. What am I looking for, specifically?"

 

"Funds, money movements, his lawyer, his girlfriend," sums Karen up, "his investments, the illegal parts of his business, known criminal associations and deaths he may have something to do with, the whole nine yards. We don't really know what we're looking for." She gestures at the van that's barely visible through the window. "I've got a lot of paperwork from the Bulletin in my bag. I'll leave it here, if that helps?"

 

"Not here." David takes a deep breath. Rises to his feet. "Somewhere else."

 

"What?"

 

"I have my family to think of, here. I've brought enough of a storm into their lives already. You're not the only one who compartmentalises things, Karen." David looks nervous, suddenly. Rubs his hands on his pants self-consciously and sways back and forth for just a moment. Sighs and turns to walk away. "I think it's best I show you. Grab your coats."

 

"Lieberman..."

 

Something in the blue of David's eyes has turned to ice when he casts Frank a look over his shoulder. She shivers at the sight. Understands that the man who spends time with his family and dotes on his wife as though she is the be all and end all of his existence is not the same as the man who could stare down an increasingly annoyed Punisher and one of the city's finest investigative journalists this way.

 

Karen Page thinks these few seconds may mark the first time she ever officially meets Micro.

 

*****

 

"Here we are," says the man some forty minutes later, standing before the most nondescript building within a thirty-mile radius. She can't tell what its original function used to be, but it's far too remote to be an office space of any kind and it looks too derelict to be any sort of functional facility. Micro exhales a nervous-sounding breath when Frank locks the van. "Keep in mind, it's still... a project. I'm not done here yet."

 

"What did you _do_?"

 

"Me? I'm keeping _all_ my family safe. Not just Sarah and the kids."

 

"Who else, then, huh? Lieberman, I swear.."

 

"You." Micro's nostrils flare as he taps Frank's chest once. "Karen. Curtis. Madani. Hell, I've even got a monitor on your erstwhile best buddy just in case that scrambled jigsaw puzzle you made out of him ever wakes up again."

 

On that note, he turns on his heel and stalks up the path that leads toward what looks to be a reinforced door. He doesn't look back to see if they follow. She watches him for a moment. Marvels at the tall man whose shoulders are now set in a straight line and whose demeanour has changed from slightly awkward and bumbling to a scary sort of assured in the span of less than an hour.

 

If Sarah noticed the shift in her husband as they said their goodbyes, she did not comment on it. The woman was unfailingly gracious, extending warm hands to Karen and expressing the wish to see her again. Sarah's comment to Frank ("think this is definitely your maybe") had Karen frowning, but even David could not really explain what that was about. She dares not ask Frank about that. Isn't sure she's earned the right to ask. Hell, she isn't sure she's got a right to judge the Liebermans just yet at all. She hardly knows them, even when it feels as though they have been a part of her life for much longer than this.

 

Karen thinks Leo may have seen the change in her dad's eyes, given the way the girl had braved a smile and hugged Frank's waist really tightly for a moment, but Zach had seemed too preoccupied to care. She'd been relieved to find that there was nothing of the Page poison in the Lieberman children. No golden hair, no too-bright eyes, no secrets that can't survive the daylight. They're all too easy to love, and she finds herself wishing for some sort of Christmas miracle in their space.

 

Christmas miracles are far away from her, now, and the place they stand in is altogether cold. There is snow in the air, or so she thinks: Karen has always been able to taste it on the wind before the first flocks start to fall. She thinks David may have that sense too, as something wistful had entered his gaze very briefly before he stepped into his car. He had looked up at the sky as if expecting the clouds above his head to clot together and drown out the stars. That look was gone as quickly as it had come, and in its stead rose something else entirely.

 

There is steel in the man now, and she thinks Frank was right to trust in that.

 

Frank, however, has stopped dead in his tracks behind her. She turns to him, questioning, and walks back until she stands close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body. It takes conscious effort for her to step that close this time, as she almost balks at the look that has appeared in his eyes. Her heart flutters and thuds inside her chest. Swells up like a balloon, only to deflate again. She's not sure if she's going to soar or crumble to the floor at the sight of him.

 

Her mother took her to the zoo once. It was old and run-down from years of use, and even back as a child she recognised the onset of decay and the unhappiness that resided within the cages. She had smiled her way through all the same. Hadn't wanted her mother to retract the annual outing to a place of her choosing.

 

The smile only became real when she saw the tiger.

 

Caged though he was, captive though he was, behind bars and glass and in an enclosure of rocks and water though he remained, the tiger was different somehow. There was a look in his eyes that spoke of the wild. Gold specks of light had struck his eyes and danced on her skin, and for a moment she thought she was one with him.

 

She can't say what makes her think of the tiger now, except that the look in Frank's eyes seems like it belongs to both hunted and hunter at the same time. Thinks that maybe he is rather like that old tiger, weary with battle and waiting out the last of his days within the sun, and it's that thought that lets her know what to do next.

 

"Come on," she says softly, coaxing him out of the cage he is crafting for himself inside his mind. She takes his hand. Tangles her fingers with his. "Micro's waiting for us. We need this, Frank. I don't like it and I think you don't either, but it's... necessary."

 

"Yeah, yeah, all right," he breathes into the air between them. "All right. We need this."

 

She keeps affirming it in soft words and whispers all the way up the path. Focuses on the heat of his hand, tangled in her own so tightly that it is almost as if he is holding her up by the force of that alone, and on the way his footsteps never stumble but his eyes look as though they're fighting a losing battle with the desire to bolt.

 

Karen finds she can't blame him when she steps inside, follows Micro's lanky form down a hallway, and first lays eyes on what can, by all rights, be called a nerve centre.

 

There are wires and monitors everywhere she looks. She spots half a dozen cameras and what looks to be a drone stacked against the far-end wall of the room. A workstation with even more wires and equipment is to her left. To her right, she thinks she can make out a radio system and other means of communication. Almost snorts out a laugh when she considers Micro may very well be one of the few civilians in the United States who's got equipment that relies on messages being relayed in Morse code.

 

She thinks Micro may be a civilian in name only when she steps further into the room, Frank's hand still locked tight in hers, and lays eyes on the stacks of information that litter every possible available surface. There are things in here that he should never have gotten his hands on. Her well-practiced mind is already categorising. Military documents, political fundraiser documentation, redacted files from gods-know-where, law enforcement files.. She shakes her head, incredulous.

 

"It's, uh, not organised yet." Micro sounds small and uncertain for the first time since he's led them here. "I'm doing what I can, but Madani and the rest of them nuked my last system and made it that much harder for me to get it all running again." He doesn't sound resentful in the slightest, which surprises her until she reads his tone as resigned instead. "I have a small stockpile on Fisk in here somewhere. It's going to be no problem to get some eyes and ears into his prison. I can deal with the rest, too."

 

"You piece of shit," growls Frank, his fingernails digging into her flesh for just a moment before he leashes his rage again. His tone is feverish and she's convinced he would slug the man across the face if not for the fact that she is now holding both of his hands in her own. She holds on tight in an attempt to calm the war. Frank doesn't seem to notice, but he doesn't pull away. "After all we did? After all the shit you did to get back to them? After, after.."

 

Micro remains calm, even as Frank devolves into angry mutters and his eyes roam over the room as though he wants to set a fire to it all. "After all of that, yes, this is _exactly_ what I'm doing." There is something both great and terrible in Micro's voice as he speaks. "I thought all I wanted was to go back to Sarah and the kids. It still is, but making that work... It doesn't. It can't." He shakes his head. "I've changed. Maybe they have, too, I think they have. We need each other less. Don't need one another the same way as before. The way it was can't work anymore."

 

"Because you were dead to them so long," she comprehends, stilling Frank's movements with a squeeze of her hands and a soft smile, "and your life changed with it."

 

"Yeah." Regret flits across the man's face for a moment. "The only way I can stay with them now is if I.. feed the monster. Feed that part of me that is still looking over its shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop." Micro gestures at the space around them. "I come here a few times a week. Reassure myself that the world keeps on turning and that I have a modicum of influence over what comes next. Your inquiry into Wilson Fisk's the most direction I've had in a whole year."

 

Frank visibly deflates the longer Micro speaks. She lets go of his hands, assured now that he is not going to harm the man, and sinks down on the nearest chair. Watches the nervous tremble in his fingers, the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallows some words that are threatening to spill forth, the furtive glance he casts around the room before his eyes fix on Micro.

 

"It looks better than the other place."

 

"Yeah, no contest there."

 

"You make sure you go home, yeah?"

 

"Yeah. You know how it is."

 

"Yeah."

 

She's not sure why tears come to her eyes, but they do and they burst out of her in jagged gasps and pauses. "You men are so fucking _stupid_ ," she finds herself wailing, all the while wishing that Sarah was here to agree with her. She's not even sure if all her tears are related to that, because it's been a while since she let loose and she thinks maybe it's a very latent reaction to almost-but-not-quite-dying. "Just.. god! Both of you!"

 

"Can't argue with that," agrees Micro readily, and she thinks she may trust him after all when he digs under one of the tables and extracts a new box of tissues from what looks to be enough food for a small army. "Here."

 

"Thanks."

 

*****

 

"If it helps at all," says Frank softly, hours later, "this isn't what I had in mind when I drove you out to see him."

 

She shakes her head slowly. Believes him in an instant. Hell, she's certain nobody she knows would believe something as impossible as a family man owning a secret base from which he can watch all of New York City. She's sure after tonight that David Lieberman is that one-of-a-kind person who makes for an excellent friend and the world's worst enemy.

 

"I don't think he is ever what you expect him to be," she observes, leaning back against the wall and tucking her feet under her on the makeshift bed. "I get it now. Why he spooked you back then. Think I would have run away so fast if that'd been me. If you look at all the stuff he's gathered.."

 

"Yeah. He's got that about him, ya know? Son of a bitch." Frank sounds almost proud. "Ironclad defenses, best in the world. CIA can't crack his coding. He's just a little bit mad scientist about it."

 

She stares at him with incredulity written all over her face. "He owns a headlamp."

 

"That, he does. Wears it, too."

 

"No!"

 

"Yeah." Frank offers her a half-laugh as he leans back on the other side of the mattress and takes a sip of his coffee. "Told you. Lieberman's a dork. Dangerous, though. Like one of 'em yapping dogs that bite your ankles."

 

A giggle bubbles up inside of her at the thought. "I can see it," she affirms. The laughter dies on her lips as quickly as it came. "I can't believe you said yes to going all the way to Kentucky."

 

"What else was there?" His gaze is steadier than hers. More assured somehow. "Karen. You have to be _safe_."

 

"We could have stayed in New York, at least?" She gestures weakly at their surroundings. "This half-bunker that David's got seems safe enough. We could wait things out here. I'd be safe, but I'd be.. I'd be in the know."

 

"Bullshit. All that'd do is make you more likely to kill Lieberman. I don't even want to know the type of trouble you two could dream up between you, either, if left to your own devices too long." Frank seems to shudder at the memory of the excited research babbling that had occurred earlier before his eyes darken in the dim light. Their brown hues gleam in the dim light of the space that is meant to pass as a bedroom. "Kentucky's safer. Cabin belonged to a friend."

 

"What happened?"

 

"He died. Last year. Karen... I can't let anything like that happen to you." His eyes shine wild and gold like the tiger's and steal her breath from her lungs. "Lieberman's right. You should have that break, stop worrying, go get some rest somehow. Kentucky'll do that. It's beautiful out there this time of year. Gunner always used to say he got snow during Christmas."

 

She knows the name Gunner. She's seen the man's face on a photograph, smiling and about as carefree as she's ever seen a Marine, arms slung around an exasperated-but-cheery Frank and a laughing Billy Russo, and saw his handwritten scrawl annotate a 'good man' in the margins of all the Kandahar paperwork that referred to Frank's act of heroism. She's somehow not surprised to learn of his death.

 

There are only four anchor points on Frank's compass, after all.

 

Curtis Hoyle has all the makings of the east point, bringing a healer's touch into Frank's world and always connecting him back into military adventures far east from here. She supposes that Billy Russo could have been the latter aspect, too, but the man's touch is acidic and erodes away all hope of better tomorrows. East is too much salvation for Billy Russo to embody. She thinks that maybe the man is more suited to always-moving south, even when he seems to have been unseated from his anchor position by Dinah Madani's southern demeanour, bright and argumentative and loyal to a fault, although Madani's reluctant to remain in Frank's orbit for long.

 

David Lieberman, however, is the steady anchor that follows the ambivalent south. _Farther west than west,_ she thinks wryly, _and dancing on some other wind_. Having met the man, now, she knows he is the one who brings about endings. Thinks he may be the one to stop Frank from passing through death's door, even, although Frank would never admit this. Frank's first thought in seeking aid will always land on the Lieberman doorstep, no matter how much he tries to keep them safe, no matter how much he wishes he could distance himself from this family.

 

She knows he wants that distance, because his eyes are calmer now that they are alone than they ever were in the Lieberman household. She smiles at him when his foot brushes her leg, stuck on the same mattress wedged between two walls as they are, and thinks she may yet be the northernmost anchor for him. She winds up in his orbit one way or another. Forms a base for him to come home to, if she's being honest, even when it feels like she is just desperately trying not to be alone.

 

"You shouldn't be alone at Christmas," he says, and she thinks Frank Castle may have learned how to read minds. He throws her an inscrutable look as he leans back against the opposite wall. She fidgets under the weight of it. "You set the flowers I got you in the window. Why?"

 

"I guess I just wanted to see you," she hums, not at all disconcerted by the change of subject. Wedges her cold feet inbetween his warm legs and lets out a soft sigh. Decides to be honest. "I guess I was scared. For myself. For the first time in a long time."

 

"Yeah. Does this, uh... does it help?"

 

"What?"

 

He looks almost embarrassed. Ducks his head. Mumbles out the words. "Me being here. With you."

 

"Yeah," she says, so softly that the words barely exist in the room they share, "it does."

 

*****

 

_"Do you really think this is the first time I've shot somebody?"_

 

_She snarls the words out before her brain catches up with all the reasons why she never talks about Kevin. Lashes out at the man seated in front of her as if he seeks to trap her in a cage like the one her family tried to keep her in. She's not made for captivity, long legs always running and claiming higher ground, arms stretched wide to the open skies in a relentless thirst for the next possible adventure, mind engaged in all the possibilities and reasons why things are the way they are and must grow out to become something else._

 

_The man in front of her doesn't know her, so he doesn't see it until it's too late._

 

_She makes him bleed the way she does all the others. Her hands are clean, her hands are clean, her hands are stained red and so clean, her hands are slick with other people's blood and the cleanest they've ever been, her hands are clean and the rest of the world is painted red. Her fingers tremble and her breath falters._

 

_He bleeds the way they always do, sloppy and messy and always so full of surprise. Shock mars his features and creates a mummer's mask out of the waxen clay where his face used to be. She asks him if he ever smiled. Asks him what the weather was like on the days he cried._

 

_The weather's always like thunder on a sunny day, like rain striking the river, like a barrage of noise pouring itself out over her city life skin. It's never quiet and the sky weeps with her more often than not._

 

_It's quiet now when she kills him._

 

_It's quiet and she's six feet under in a box with dirt piled high above her and she thinks the earth itself must be some living and breathing thing because it presses in on her and threatens to drown her in the taste of the soil and the blood that almost reaches her lips and daddy always said she looked like she'd been drinking blood while the truth of it was that it was Kevin who was that side of vicious on the best days and there was nothing anybody could've done about that but she's the one who's alive and that doesn't seem fair at all_

 

_or does it?_

 

_does it?_

 

_The blood is at her lips and rising still and she lingers in the cold hard ground and does it hurt at all does it_

 

_does it hurt–_

 

She wakes with a gasp.

 

Wakes to pain that makes it hard to breathe. Jagged gasps erupt from her lungs as she struggles to seat herself upright. Pain shoots through her skull, white and searing and vision-impairing for just a second before the haze clears anew. Her stomach lurches. She scrambles toward the edge of the mattress. Fucking half-waddles to its edge like a severely unbalanced penguin and pitches her head over it just in time. A sob escapes her before her stomach freefalls and spins into another lurch that has her heaving the remains of family dinner out of her body onto the floor.

 

She can feel James Wesley's eyes on her as her stomach cramps up again and a dull ache shoots through her shoulder.

 

Fucking _fantastic_.

 

"Hey, hey," a soft voice says behind her, and a cool hand brushes her hair back from her brow, "hey now. Sshh. Sshh."

 

Another strangled sob bursts forth from her body as the mattress behind her dips to Frank's weight and his arm snakes around her waist with gingerly applied pressure. His hand tangles in her hair and holds it back out of her face. The salt of her tears mingles with the halt-and-flow of her nausea.

 

_Does it hurt? Does it hurt at all?_

 

She raises her eyes. Near the door, kneeling before it as though he is someone holy kneeling before absolution, glasses glittering in the dim light Frank must have switched on before reaching for her, is James Wesley. She thinks he asked her a question.

 

"Does it?" she says out loud, not caring about the way Frank starts behind her and tightens his hold on her. "What does?"

 

_Being alive._

 

"Yeah."

 

"Ma'am," he says, his breath a ghost on her skin, his voice low in her ear, "there's nobody here but us."

 

"Not true," she gasps out, leaning back slightly and letting out a soft groan. Doesn't know how to tell him that the space around them is full of loss. Vermont tastes like ashes on her lips. Her hand finds his knee. "There's... There's all I've done."

 

His silence is a comfort. He's the only one in her life content to let space just be space, never demanding more in speech, never asking unless there is something in her eyes that challenges him to draw things out in sound. He's just there with her, hand wrapped around her hair, arm brushing past old bruises and skimming her ribcage in tiny soothing motions, heartbeat thudding softly through her battered body.

 

"F-Fisk will come for me." She stumbles the name out and closes her eyes. Rocks back against him now that her stomach's done protesting the worst of her. "Not just because I helped put him in jail. It's not that at all." James Wesley's face contorts into a contemptuous sneer. "I killed his assistant. James Wesley. That was all me."

 

Frank's hand stills on her ribs.

 

"He threatened me. Threatened Ben, Foggy, Matt.. threatened anything and anyone in my life in order to get me to shut up. He said he wouldn't kill me. Not at first, anyway. He would just target everybody else I've ever cared about. He would have done _anything_ to stop me from talking about Fisk like the devil that man is." She doesn't mean for it to come out so forceful, so convinced of her being right and James Wesley being wrong. Lets out a shuddering breath. Her stomach roils and her hands are clammy with sweat. She can't stop herself from sneering out disdain until James Wesley's glasses flicker in the light again and vanish from her sight soon after. "He'd put a loaded gun on the table between us. Didn't tie my hands. Suppose I wasn't enough of a _threat_ to him." She swallows thickly. Tries to say the rest of it through the clots of grief that coat her windpipe. "His phone rang. I grabbed the gun. He didn't think I'd shoot him. Such bullshit. He rose to his feet." A shrug. "I pulled the trigger. Once. Then emptied the clip."

 

"Kar–"

 

"It wasn't the first time." She rushes the words out. Needs to make him understand that he's holding onto someone who should have been ashes and dirt a long time ago. Needs to make him see that he's not the only one of them who has done terrible things to safeguard the little good they've been given. "Before him, there was another." Kevin's face swims in her line of vision. Accusatory. Relieved. _Little brother_. "I was the target. But I told Kevin to take my car that day, because he'd been gunning to drive it for ages now and you know the kind of whining that siblings do... He was a pain in my ass about it." She lets out a short laugh. Shakes her head just a little and fights the rising nausea back down. "The brakes had been tampered with. The car spun out of Kevin's control. My.. my little brother _died_. And I just.. I.."

 

"Yeah." Frank _knows_. "You did what you had to do."

 

"Did I? Or is that just.. what I tell myself? To help me sleep at night?"

 

She knows they're rhetorical questions the second she asks them. She wonders how many answers he gives himself. Wonders how many of them are lies, because she's always worried that she isn't truthful with herself about these things in the slightest. Maybe there aren't any answers at all. Maybe it's just this, fighting to hold it together, atoning and sinning in equal measure every single day, balancing the scales, and maybe there's nothing else to be an answer for her at all.

 

She gestures at her body. At the sick on the floor. At the room that feels more like a bunker and hiding space than it does a bedroom of any description. "What if this is just me now?" she asks, and she's so tired that it comes out more as a mumble than as harsh words spoken in the silence that's invited itself into the long spaces between their interactions. "What if it doesn't.. what if I can't move forward?"

 

"Then don't you deserve to know that, too?" Strong arms wrap around her as he murmurs the question out loud. She lets out a soft sigh when she realises he's just throwing her own words back in her face. Lets her head come to rest against his chest. "Karen. There's always tomorrow. I'm here, okay?" His heartbeat thuds a frantic pace in her ears. His voice is soft and his hands are caring. "I got you. Yeah, I got you. Sshh. Come here. I got you, Kar."

 

She lets herself believe it. Lets herself fall into his arms as he leans back against the wall and pulls her in close. Her last thought before she falls asleep once more is that perhaps she doesn't need to move forward at all.

 

*****

 

"I hate it when you're right. About anything. Did I ever mention that? I _hate_ it, Frank."

 

Micro is a steady stream of complaints that Frank by and large elects to ignore the next afternoon. Standing behind his chair and observing the working monitors around them, Karen is inclined to agree with him. It had taken just fifteen minutes of assaulting the prison's security system before Micro shook his head and lamented the atrocious state funding going into anything but cybersecurity. He had amended the lament when it became apparent that the prison is more an open door facility than a locked space.

 

Fisk rules the roost. She had anticipated that, but seeing it in action almost makes her queasy to her stomach again. Sweat beads on her brow and pools in her hands as she observes the big man give out orders on screen. He looks so comfortable, as though there is no place he'd rather be than behind bars issuing demands and making himself the centre of it all.

 

"He's like this really big spider," says Micro, disgust written all over his features, voicing her thoughts rather expertly, "and if you somehow fail to step on him I am officially going to invest in a bug zapper the size of _Jupiter_ so I can take that asshole out myself."

 

"You keep dreaming," says Frank, although the corners of his mouth lift into an affectionate smile at Micro's words. His arm brushes hers as he comes to stand next to her. "You think there's a danger of him getting loose?"

 

"Yeeeah. I'd say so."

 

"At least we'll know as soon as it happens." She tries to reassure herself. "You'll let us know, right?"

 

"Got your contact details up and running right here, don't you worry." Micro actually reaches out to pat the burner phones affectionately, which earns him a raised eyebrow from Frank. "I got you covered. In the meantime, you two kids need a break. Get outta town."

 

"I could stay," she says. Is still not convinced that getting out of the city is a good idea. She hugs herself as tightly as she dares until her body protests at the feeling. "If he does get out, I could... I could act as bait. Give you a chance to take him down before he does any more damage."

 

"No, absolutely not," says Frank.

 

"Not yet," amends Micro. The curly-haired hacker gives her a nod of assent that has Frank hissing out some kind of threat under his breath. "Do me a favour," he says to her then, ignoring Frank entirely, "and get him out of my hair before he starts throwing chairs at me again. I'm all out of migraine medication."

 

"Again?"

 

"Yeah. Again."

 

Micro doesn't elect to elaborate on that. She looks between the men and wonders again how much she missed last year. Neither one of them bothers to elaborate on Micro's comment, but she knows Frank well enough to realise that bodily threats aren't outside the realm of possibility. She remembers how spooked he was about Micro at first. Remembers the tremor in his voice and the furtive glances at everything in the vicinity, as if simply being outside in the city made him a living and breathing target for this hacker they knew nothing about.

 

Looking at Micro's monitors now, she can't say Frank was wrong.

 

Security camera footage litters the monitors in split screens and varying angles. A police scanner runs quiet noise in the background as files after files about Fisk's dealings pop up underneath Micro's fingertips. She pulls up a chair, mesmerised, as he navigates through the NYPD's maze with ease and starts to extract crime scene photographs and reports that she's quite certain even Mahoney hasn't connected the dots on just yet. There's something lightning quick in the way his eyes brighten and darken along with what he reads, as if a lightbulb is flickering on and off in his brain and giving him enough direction to go in. There is no hesitation in what he chooses to do.

 

Tension evaporates from the set of her shoulders the longer she watches him work. Her limbs are liquid for the first time since the attack, with an ease of being slipping into her veins the longer she sits and stays vigilant. She vaguely hears Frank lose interest and start puttering around in the background. Hears him go outside half a dozen times, dragging bags and other equipment with him, and finally smells familiar citrus as he settles down enough to clean some of the weaponry he always carries.

 

"You should probably leave before dusk," comments Micro, finally, as he turns in his seat to face her. "I got you a stationwagon, good plates, clean stuff. None of that delivery service crap. Nobody's gonna believe an NY-based delivery service makes it out to Kentucky and stays in the area for some time. You'd be sitting ducks." She hadn't even considered that. Isn't sure Frank had, either, but he doesn't look surprised. Come to think of it, he's probably dumped all the bags in the new car already. "Stationwagon means you're a family, so try to bicker about directions at the local gas station or something. Don't give them the sense that one of you has kidnapped the other."

 

She snorts out a laugh at that. "I don't think we've ever looked like.. oh, wait, we have. Sort of." Her head swivels around to where Frank's sitting. "Does the hotel count?"

 

"Hotel. Diner. Woodlands. Take your pick."

 

"Woodlands weren't anything like that," she argues, willing Ray Schoonover's face to stop appearing before her eyes. "You didn't kidnap me then."

 

"Way you looked, perched on the seat, _after_.. yeah. Could have fooled anybody who didn't know you or me or this thing."

 

For all her yelling at him, for all the ways she tried to dissuade him from murder, she had simply seated herself next to the car out on the road and waited him out. She would've driven away. Should have, to cement what she'd spat at him in the woods. _You're dead to me, Frank._ She snorts at the memory. Can still recall the look of surprise that etched itself into the lines and grooves of his face when he made it out the woods only to find her sitting there with her back against the car's front wheel and tears frozen on her cheeks.

 

It had just been too much like Kevin. Too much like back then.

 

After it'd first happened, she'd had trouble getting back into a car and driving along any kind of road. Hell, first time after, she'd just sat behind the steering wheel fighting a panic attack all the way through in the school's dimly-lit parking lot while all her friends were at the Homecoming game. She couldn't drive past chainlink fences, either, which was some bullshit her brain had cooked up and always gave her grief after. Half the damn town had those fences.

 

She shakes herself loose of Vermont. Curses the fact that it's still December. Blames December for all her troubles, if she's honest, because Kevin may have crashed in summer but it was winter that shut her out from family.

 

Her hands fold around the mug David Lieberman holds out for her to take. He mumbles something about instant-cocoa not being as good as the real deal, but she takes it for what it is. Thinks it's part peace offering and part care for her wellbeing somehow, which she's not sure she deserves to get from a man she's been slow to trust.

 

"We should leave before dusk," she echoes.

 

Feels the decision settle in her bones, brittle and strong at once, soon after.

 

*****

 

The cabin is barely big enough to house two people.

 

It's certainly not big enough for two people and an oversized pine tree she's pretty sure Frank just chopped down illegally somewhere in this sprawling forest.

 

"Really?" she asks him, exasperated, when he lets out a grunt of annoyance and tries to squeeze the evergreen branches through the door. It's snowing something fierce outside, with several inches of it predicted to fall in the next few hours, and somehow his petulant expression manages to make him look like the least threatening snowman she's ever laid eyes on. She doesn't let up, though. "You're really going to drag that thing in here? You couldn't have gotten something smaller?"

 

"Tree seller didn't have smaller," he says waspishly, reacting as though stung by her words, "and I'd be damned if I got you one of 'em tiny singing trees that are only good to smack someone around the head with."

 

The corner of her mouth quirks upward at that. "I can't wait to see you attempt to hit Curt with a tree that sings _'We Wish You A Merry Christmas'_ at the top of its.. well.." She laughs as it occurs to her that even fake Christmas trees don't have lungs. "We both know that Micro would get the jump on you before you tried to do anything to him." She pauses. Only now registers what he said. "You actually _bought_ this monstrosity?"

 

"Page," he says, and she dimly reflects that this is the first time he's been short with her like this, exasperation colouring his voice darker still, "you have been complaining about not having a tree for the past four days now."

 

"I know that." She thinks she has the grace to look a tiny bit embarrassed at the reminder. Pink warmth rises in her cheeks. "I just.. where are we going to put this, Frank?"

 

Gunner had lived alone. Frank had called him 'off the grid', as though that explains why the only luxuries in the cabin are running water and a separate bathroom. The space may have been big enough for one grown man, but with two people cooking and doing other things the cabin can seem awfully small already. She thinks spending longer than a month in it is just begging for claustrophobia to kick in. Thinks maybe it's different in summers when hazy humidity tugs at the heat and sleeping outside might become preferable to being stuck in a wooden cabin.

 

"By the bed," he replies, nodding at the little space between bed and couch before tugging all of the tree into the cabin. She blinks at the suggestion. Frowns. He lets out a soft hiss between his teeth before smiling at her. "It'll work. If you could, uh, just, get some of the bags outta the car? There's lights and some decorations in them. Nothing fancy but uh.." He scratches the back of his head. Colour tinges his own cheeks as he sets the tree upright. Something wistful enters his gaze. "I couldn't just get you a tree and nothing else."

 

It's the wistfulness that does it.

 

She wraps one of Micro's insanely long scarves around her head and bundles up in Frank's spare coat. Toes her feet into old boots she's been told never fit Sarah right, though she thinks their garish pink colour might be more of a reason why the woman never saw fit to wear them. She's living in borrowed and newly bought clothes, never having had the chance to go home and pack like normal people do when they go out of state on the first goddamn holiday they've had in years.

 

She idly wonders how the flowers on the windowsill are holding up.

 

The cold bites at the skin around her eyes the second she steps outside. Snow crunches underneath her heels and settles in her hair as she walks down toward the car. She loves the sound of winter more than she can bear: her footsteps creaking through new layers of snow, ice twinkling through the tree branches, the silence that settles somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach and fills her with a quiet type of giddy joy.

 

The narrow and winding access road is an adventure she can't wait to drive once her arm is back to fully functional. She's dutifully doing the Claire-prescribed exercises for the shoulder and listening to Frank's cut-corners-and-function tools of the trade and thinks by rights that that should be enough to put her back together again. She wants to come back to this place when she's older, and the thought of that just makes her shake her head. _Older, Page, really, what are you, a child?_

 

Frank says this place has changed since he was here last. She'll catch him sometimes, staring out at the forest as if it's alive and calling out his name, shaking his head at the access road he claims wasn't there before, cursing Micro under his breath for somehow acquiring the land and the cabin that stands on it. He calls it _sentiment_ and makes it sound like a curse. His eyes are haunted at times, staring at the corners of the cabin as though he sees ghosts crawling out of the woodwork, looking out at the surrounding forest as if he bears witness to the passing of something other than time.

 

He may say this tree is for her, but she doesn't believe him for a second.

 

_Making new memories,_ Ellison once said, _is like diluting all the old into things worth keeping._ She hadn't understood it, not really, but looking at the backseat of the old brown stationwagon now she thinks she might have an idea. Boxes of fairy lights and multi-coloured decorations are strewn out upon it in haphazardly packed bags, while the front seat holds an actual decent coffeemaker.

 

"God, I could kiss you," she murmurs out loud, cheeks heating underneath the scarf.

 

There's only so much insta-coffee she can wolf down before her stomach starts to protest. Micro might not consider a coffee machine worth the investment, but she knows Frank spent the better part of half an hour yelling at him down the phone upon finding out that the revolting coffee was the only available option in the cabin. Still, to actually go out and buy a coffeemaker...

 

"You were right," announces Frank loudly, coming up behind her and heavily crunching the snow beneath his own boots, "that tree is too big. I set it upright and it just... Yeah."

 

"You had to snap the top off of it first?" she asks, tugging her scarf down for a moment as she addresses him. "Figures."

 

"Nah. Top fits just fine, even when you can't set the star on it anymore. It's the branches on the side that just... don't function."

 

"They're branches, Frank. I think they serve a function. Have a purpose." She hides a smile behind the scarf as she picks the first few bags off of the backseat. "I suppose we'll be fine as long as they don't invade the bed."

 

"Yeah," he grunts, lifting the coffee machine off of the front seat and grabbing hold of the remaining bags, "about the bed.."

 

"You're sleeping on the tree's side."

 

"Won't fit. I'm going to sleep on the couch."

 

She throws him a wary look over her shoulder. "No, you're not," she says, vividly recalling the argument much like this one they'd had when they first saw the cabin's interior. "I'd sooner put the mattress on the floor than let you sleep on that lumpy thing." She shakes her head in disapproval. Knows that Frank Castle is, at times, hellbent on torturing himself. She'll have none of that. Not while she's here, not while she's alive. _Unless_... She struggles to voice it. Does so anyway. "Unless you're tired of sleeping next to me."

 

Frank, damn him, doesn't even dignify that with a reply.

 

Snow flurries around them as they make the short trek up to the cabin. She steals sideways glances at him as they walk. Almost loses her footing in the white as a gust of wind sweeps under her arms and tugs at her waist. She steadies herself haphazardly. Feels like a young deer that's only just learning how to walk. _Like flippin' Bambi, trotting through the snow,_ she thinks, all the while attempting to ignore the way the corners of his mouth curl up and his eyes sparkle in the clear light.

 

"You're kidding," she says, laying eyes on the tree again as it proudly stands in the centre of the cabin. Halts in her tracks for just a moment. "The only way that's _ever_ going to work is if we throw the dining table out."

 

"Or I could sleep on the couch."

 

She raises her eyebrow. Issues an unspoken challenge.

 

"Dining table, then," he amends, offering her a small smile.

 

"Unless you're tired of me," she says again.

 

The look he throws her way is hard. Unflinching. Slightly on the side of incredulous, too. She wonders when she became practiced at reading even the smallest expression on his face as though he is an open book to her. Thinks she's categorised every line on his face, every glint of his eyes, every set of his mouth, every blink and gesture. Thinks he can't surprise her anymore.

 

"I'll never be that, Karen."

 

She thinks maybe there are still some surprises left, after all.

 

*****

 

She picks nothing but red and white flowers for the cabin.

 

It's the day before Christmas and her injuries have finally visibly subsided enough for her to accompany Frank on one of his errand runs through the nearby town. She ventured into the florist's shop almost unthinkingly, drawn in by the pretty creations in the window and the smell of fresh flowers in midwinter. Frank had left her to it. She's pretty certain he's catching up with Micro, because she can only just make out his agitated pacing next to their car.

 

"You're lucky we've still got those poinsettias in stock," remarks a voice behind her.

 

It takes all of her willpower to not jump a foot into the air. Is suddenly grateful that she left her gun back at the cabin, not wanting to be too conspicuous an outsider in a town as small as this one. She half-turns and meets the eyes of the older shopkeeper who'd issued a friendly greeting as soon as she'd walked in the door. Breathes a sigh of relief.

 

"I honestly thought you might not have any of these left," she replies, smiling her relief out broadly for all the world to see, "what with it being almost Christmas and all. Surprised you've still got paperwhites and amaryllis, too. Back home, they used to be sold out all the time this close to the holiday."

 

"People like to buy their things from supermarkets these days." The woman offers her a too-knowing smile, probably having seen Frank stockpile a bunch of groceries from exactly such a supermarket before. "Are you buying these as a gift or for personal use?"

 

"Oh, personal use. We decided to spend Christmas in this area where we hardly know a soul, so it's really just for us. Pete already got us a Christmas tree, but I figured that we could use some flowers to go with that too." His chosen name feels foreign on her tongue. She prays the woman won't be able to tell that she almost trips over it as though it does not belong with the rest of her words. "We really didn't come prepared, to be honest with you! I flaked out on buying presents altogether. We've been on the go all year, you know how it is."

 

"Your husband's the one I came across a day or so ago, lugging that big tree behind 'im, then?" The shopkeeper sounds rather amused about that. Karen supposes it must've been quite the sight to watch Frank try and load the damn thing into the car. "I told Jim, I said, them lovely tourists must be desperate if they buyin' one of your big logs. He seemed to think it was hilarious. Did help your husband load it up, though."

 

She wants to correct the woman. Wants to softly admit that Frank had a wife once and that her name was Maria. Wants to shout his children's names at the top of her lungs if it means they won't be forgotten. She wants to say _that's not me, I'm not his family_ but her breath is stuck in her lungs and her words don't form right in her mouth. Micro's _you're a family_ wedges itself in her brain and refuses to shake loose.

 

Karen Page stands in a flower shop in the middle of Kentucky's nowhere and thinks _well, shit_.

 

"The tree was so big that it hardly fit into our cabin," she says instead, smiling all the while and praying her voice won't crack on the lie she allows to exist. "Pete almost had to sleep on the floor before we figured out a better place for it. He would've done it, too. I drove him crazy saying I wanted a tree." She shakes her head affectionately. Looks at him out the window and hopes he won't come inside to see what's taking her so long. Hopes Micro will keep him talking for just a while longer. "He always does these little things, you know? Usually, he's the one buying the flowers. Gets me white roses every time."

 

"That's a keeper, you know." Karen decides she likes the shopkeeper when the woman's voice drops to a conspirational whisper and she takes the bundles of flowers out of her hands. "A man who gets you flowers and does rather stupid things like buy a tree that's too big for a holiday home to handle is exactly the kind of man you gotta hold onto. Hold on with both hands and don't let go, all right?"

 

"What?"

 

She's gotten that advice before. Remembers a dimly-lit diner and what felt like the end of the world hurtling toward her at breakneck speed. _You've got it,_ he'd said. That kind of crazy love he'd had for Maria, raw and pure and beautiful, and he'd thought she somehow knew what that was like. Shit, she doesn't think she knew back then. Doesn't think she's ever felt any such way about Matt, even when she was trying to convince herself that she did.

 

If she's honest, and she wants to be, she knows the feeling now.

 

"You hold on to that one, sugar." The woman reaches out. Pats her hand. "He looks like a good man."

 

"Yeah. He is."

 

The smile is still on her face when she leaves the store with her arms full of flowers. There's a spring in her step that she hasn't had in ages, fueled by the prospect of good food in good company. Even the snow that is turning to muddy slush out on the main street does nothing to dampen her spirits.

 

His expression as she draws closer to the car _does_.

 

"What is it?" she asks, brow knitting together in concern over how empty his eyes are and how his mouth has set in a thin line. "Is something wrong?"

 

He shrugs. Blinks rapidly. Looks away.

 

"Frank."

 

"He's out." The words are a rasp. Their meaning terrible. Still, he says the name. She thinks that might be the only way to make it real. "Fisk."

 

"Well, shit," she comments again, out loud this time.

 

"That's all you've got to say?"

 

"We always knew he would break free." She shrugs. Carefully sets the flowers in the trunk of the car and turns to look at him. "There is nothing we can do about it here. Micro's got him covered, right?"

 

"Yeah. Paranoia's good like that."

 

"So, let's not... let's not let this ruin Christmas," she says, feeling something burn to ashes in the pit of her stomach all the same. James Wesley's face stares impassively back at her from the car window. She swallows a scream. "We'll deal with Fisk, after."

 

She can always tell when Frank is lying to her. She can tell when he's omitting parts of the truth, more like, because Frank never lies to her outright. Maybe it's because he doesn't do it often and certainly isn't stupid enough to keep it up for long, but she catches worried glances thrown sideways at her all throughout their ride back to the cabin. It unsettles her more than the thought of Wilson Fisk stepping back out of his prison a free man.

 

There is something he's not saying, so she exhausts every topic she can think of. Inquires after Foggy's safety first and learns that Jessica Jones has somehow, unfathomably, taken a liking to him. Asks after Marci seconds later, a gesture born of the simple acknowledgment that the other woman is part and parcel of Foggy's life now, and learns that Marci has gotten even scarier under Jeri Hogarth's tutelage. She even thinks to ask after Danny Rand's wellbeing. He _did_ save her life, golden curls shining bright in the lamplight, Kevin reincarnate for only a moment before reality sank back in. Is grateful to hear that he has found a good space with fellow fighters, even when it does nothing to fix the restlessness that lodges itself deeper in her bones with every passing word Frank speaks.

 

The Liebermans are doing fine, of course, because a family like theirs is always in the right place when everyone is together. She smirks as she learns of Sarah setting up camp in Micro's hideout, monitoring security feeds and pouring over information alongside her husband while the kids are in school. She was right about the woman and somehow that makes her feel vindicated. Thinks it's good for Micro, too, because his more paranoid mumbles had set her teeth on edge in the short space of time she'd spent with him.

 

She knows she shouldn't be surprised to learn that Frank has Micro keep tabs on Dinah Madani, but slowly blinks when she hears about the woman's most recent exploits that take her neck-deep into the life of Russian organised crime. A tingle shoots up her spine when she recognises names and locations. She's sure it must show on her face, too, because Frank curses out loud and tells her Madani already gives him enough grey hairs for a living as if that's going to change her resolve to call Dinah about these things once she returns to the city.

 

Curt is the last she inquires after, though she knows that the man's doing just fine when Frank's gaze softens for a little while and he spends an extraordinary amount of time describing the service dog Curt expects to take on as a companion sometime in the next few days. She's amused to learn it's not a full-fledged service dog, as it apparently keeps getting distracted a little too often to be of much help where it counts at all. Still, the dog is exactly right for the therapy group Curt runs. She hopes to meet the dog in real life sometime, if for no other reason than the fact that the thought of the dog makes him smile just as wide as he'd smiled when she'd put up all the lights in the tree and twirled around the cabin in a mad little happy dance she hadn't done since she was very little and very strange.

 

She has exhausted every topic and every common ground between them, and yet she is no closer to figuring out what he is trying to hide from her.

 

It haunts her all throughout Christmas Eve dinner's quiet affair. Makes her sneak glances at him while she's potting and repotting the flowers and setting them in the space they have slowly crafted for themselves. She sits with him a while when he cleans their guns. Reads Frost's poetry out loud to him while he sets them coffee, voice soft like the snow that tumbles from the sky and colours his cheeks red when he checks the locks later that night.

 

_The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.._

 

He doesn't share until the woods around them have gone quiet and they are huddled together underneath the bedcovers. She's long given up on putting any sort of distance between them in bed, as the desire to warm her icy feet upon his skin had won out that first night and his shocked intake of breath had been worth all of her audacity. They've spent long nights like this for almost a week now, pretending the world away, waking in the morning with tangled limbs and breaths on each other's skin, remaining in their cocoon for a little while longer every day before the need to go outside matters more than the urge to remain as they are.

 

"There is something else," he says, and the moonlight shines regret upon his face.

 

"Tell me." Her whisper is more certain than she feels. A knot loops and ties itself neatly in her belly. "I knew something was wrong."

 

He lets out a soft, gentle laugh at the fact that she wasn't fooled. It's hard to hide from her and she thinks he doesn't mean to. "That why you've been watching me, ma'am?" he asks, voice lilting into a tease, fingers curling around an errant hair of hers that has landed on his arm. "To figure it out?"

 

"I like watching you," she says, instead, because she's always honest at this time of night.

 

"David mentioned something else, too." She thinks it's the first time she's heard him use Micro's given name – not Lieberman, not Micro, not _pain in my ass_ or any kind of attack like that – and it sets her teeth on edge. She lies still, unblinking, unmoving, barely breathing, and feels her world slip away from her grasp at his next words. "Fisk got out of jail bright and early yesterday. We'd agreed to watch him. Figure out the next moves. Would've told you, just not right away. Had to get things in order first."

 

"I thought as much." And, truth be told, she _had_. She knows these men well enough – knows _Frank_ well enough – to know all their misguided attempts at keeping her happy and safe for just a little while longer. Her hand finds his and tangles her fingers between the spaces he leaves for her. He trembles in her grasp. "But that's not all," she says, then, always too perceptive for her own good, "and you can't keep me safe from everything."

 

"David said he'd seen something else on some of the security feeds from around the city. Said it'd taken him a while to figure out what he was looking at. _Who_ he was looking at. I think he must've spent hours hunting down scraps of information that would explain it, but.." His hold on her tightens. His breath escapes him in erratic bursts and pauses, weaving cold and heat on her face as she watches him. His breath hitches in an almost panicked way, and her heart tightens in her chest at the sound. "He is _so_ sure that he saw Daredevil."

 

She closes her eyes.

 

Curses the day she ever, _ever_ met Matthew Murdock.

 

"If you want to go back.."

 

His words may just as well be spoken in some kind of foreign tongue for all the sense they make. He sounds hesitant about it, as if he is not sure if he is choosing the right words for a situation like this one at all. She doesn't think there are good words for times like these when the world she's in tilts and shifts on its axis. All she feels is the pillow her head rests upon. All she feels is the bedcover on her bare arm, soft and heavy, and the blanket that is bunched together at her feet. All she feels is his hand in hers, and she tightens her hold on him reflexively when he means to withdraw from her.

 

"I'm not going back," she says. Isn't sure right now if she means the city or the relationship with that. Decides it doesn't matter when she opens her eyes to find Frank Castle staring at her in the dim light of the moon and the whiter-than-white snow gleaming just beyond the window. She decides something in this moment. Voices it before her fear of unknown things and new beginnings can retract it again. "I'm _never_ going back."

 

"Karen.."

 

"I'm not," she says, and salt tears ripple through her vision and blur his face. "I can't deal with this. I don't want to. I'm sick of it!" That, at least, is the truth, even when the words rip themselves from her throat so violently that she's almost screaming in his face. A monster resides within her chest and clutters her breathing. Dark encroaches on her mind soon after, vicious and not relenting, and makes her spit poison out into the space between them. "Did you know? When you told me to hold on to him, did you _know_? All that bullshit about love and people who can hurt you, and you never _once_ acted like you heard me when I said he damages people. He _breaks_ them, and that's the truth. And that's before I ever fucking knew about him being Daredevil, that's before I knew all the lies and the pile-up of self-righteous sanctimonious _bullshit_ that he likes to convince himself of, that's before.."

 

The noise she makes in the back of her throat sounds rather like an angry cat. Anger spikes in her chest, darker still than the monster that sits in her lungs and makes her words hoarse and rippling like pebbles thrown into a pond, and she lets out a huff of noise when her brain finally catches up with her. Matt Murdock. Daredevil. _Alive_. Impossibly, stupidly, unexpectedly _alive_.

 

"Oh my god," she says then, abject horror sinking into the pit of her stomach, "Foggy. He has no idea. Oh my god."

 

"He will. Red wasn't exactly quiet about it. Guess he and Fisk have a score to settle, yeah?"

 

"I don't give a flying fuck if he does," she says, "and for all I care they can kill each other off."

 

"You don't mean that."

 

She lets go of his hand. Sits up abruptly, grateful that her ribs no longer protest against sudden movements, and fixes him with a fierce glare. "Watch me," she snarls. Draws a sharp breath in between her teeth. Continues to glare down at him. "You didn't answer my question. Did. You. Know?"

 

"Yeah." His reply is instantaneous. Soft. Too careful. "Red loves the sound of his own voice. Had enough preachin' done at me to know that voice, even in court before I drove it straight to hell."

 

"And you told me to hold on, why?"

 

"He's the better man."

 

"The fuck he is."

 

"Kar–"

 

"Don't you _Karen_ me," she warns, cutting off whatever else he wanted to say. "Want to know what I think? I think you're just spewing bullshit. I think you're telling me to hold on to _anything_ that isn't _you_." She spits the words at him. They've made sense in her head before, in all the silence that followed that night in the woods before he walked back into her life with his arms full of white flowers. She's never dared say it before. "You don't get to make that call, you hear me? Not on your own. I get a say, too. And I'm holding on to you until my lungs give out and my heart stops beating because that's the only way you're ever getting rid of me again, you understand?"

 

She flops back down onto the bed, but doesn't face him. She elects to stare up at the wooden ceiling instead. Sees the too-big Christmas tree loom over the foot of their bed. A soft snort escapes her. She thinks Matt's got impeccable timing when it comes to attempts to ruin someone's festive mood. Vows to let it be just an attempt to ruin this time, now that she's here in this space and moving forward into some other direction. Her fingertips tremble as she reaches out again.

 

Frank's hand is warm in hers when she laces her fingers through his anew.

 

"Can I say something, now?" he asks, rather dryly. He doesn't force her to look at him. Doesn't wait until she's done staring at the ceiling. She nods just once, moonlight streaming over her face and casting her skin in a pale glow, and thinks of how all things beautiful are defeated in winter. "You, uh.." He starts, but breaks off in a huff. Breathes up his own quiet storm at the unsuspecting ceiling. It takes him a while before he speaks again. "You make me feel."

 

_Feel all the things I don't want to feel,_ her mind supplies. _Feel all the things I never thought I'd feel again._

 

His hand becomes her hand's heavy burden that her heart vows to carry.

 

"I'm not alone," he says, and it sounds like heartbreak. It sounds like ghosts on his breath. It sounds like all of yesterday and most of tomorrow, while it should just be nothing but today. She smiles at the sound. "I have nothin', Kar, you understand? Nothing to give. Shit, I got nothing."

 

"Nothing except your name, and a cabin in the woods," she amends, water streaming from her eyes and joining with the sea that rolls and tumbles in her veins, "and enough space in your bed."

 

"Nothing except that," he agrees.

 

"It's enough," she whispers. "Shit, Frank, it has to be enough." A smile spills sunshine between the tears. "It's all I've got, too."

 

His voice comes out in a rasp and war-torn whisper. "Yeah."

 

"Yeah," she says, lighter still, and squeezes his hand. "All I've got."

 

*****

 

He evades her gaze early the next morning.

 

He's up before she wakes, setting her cup of coffee and breakfast on the bedside table before stomping outside to bend snow's blankets to his will. She reads his spine-cracked and worn-down copy of Fitzgerald's _The Crack-Up_ and pauses at the scribbles within its margins. Her fingertips curl over script ( _you will never be as good a man again_ ) and handwritten scribbles ( _truth_ ) and she considers there are a great many lies that Frank Castle has been telling himself.

 

She shakes her head as the morning continues and he remains knee-deep in the white world outside her window. She isn't certain what he's trying to do, except for when he edges back indoors long enough to chop some fruit up for the birds. She doesn't think he's avoiding her, not really, because if he was he would be out in town right now calling David Lieberman and planning some kind of escape from quiet Kentucky.

 

Instead, she finds him on the porch staring down at ivy branches that have somehow looped themselves around the wood.

 

"All we need is a little holly," she offers, and hopes she makes it sound like peace. "It's nice out."

 

"Yeah." His voice is so soft that she almost misses his words. "Happy Christmas, Kar."

 

"Happy Christmas, Frank," she breathes, and smiles at the reddened tips of his ears and the tight set of his shoulders. Thinks maybe it's not so bad when her stomach doesn't seem like the only thing doing funny loops today. She takes care to keep her voice light. Makes it as airy and carefree as she can manage. "Wish I could say I got you something, but I only saw the flower shop this past week because _someone_ had whisked me away before I got a chance to buy anything else."

 

"They don't have shit in this town," he mutters, glancing at her over his shoulder. "I looked. Nothin' seemed right for you. Didn't even get you flowers."

 

"That's all right."

 

"Yeah? That the life you want, ma'am?"

 

There's the soldier all right, gunning for a fight, voice like combat in his lungs.

 

"That the life you can give me, sir?" she shoots back, voice freezing into something harder than the icicles that have formed neat rows on their roof's edge.

 

"Shit, Karen, don't do this."

 

"Do what?"

 

"You don't get to do that!" He's all fire and unguided explosion now, detonating at will in gestures and an angry huff. She almost smiles at the memory. Recalls a time last year when the water's edge had heard him utter the exact same words. Frowns when the words he continues with are the most self-deprecating she's ever heard him. "You don't get to stand here and tell me that this is okay, that this is what you _want_ , that you've got nothing else to go back to that feels better than standin' here with me and pretendin' this is all you've got going for yourself. You're better than that. Shit, you're better than me."

 

"I'm really not, you know," she tells him conversationally. Her eyes are dry this time. A smile edges into her voice as she looks at his dark form so white against the snow. "We're as bad as each other, Frank. Where it counts, deep down, that's all we are." She scoffs, and makes it sound _tired_. "I don't know why you don't see that."

 

His lips brush her brow as he steps close enough for her to inhale.

 

He smells like snow, he smells like forest, he smells like holly berries and chestnuts.

 

"I see it," he confesses, lips to her hair, breath spiralling around its strands. "Kar. I see you. All of that." He leans back, and his eyes are darker than she's ever seen them. His voice is a terrified whisper. "It scares the shit out of me."

 

Her hands fold around his shoulders. Hold him steady. She braves a smile up at him, and leans in close. "It scares me too," she says quietly, heart going pitter-patter in her chest like that of a deer fleeing before the wild hunt, "but that's all right." Her eyes search his, and the tide sweeps her off her feet as soon as she finds her anchor in his gaze. "I'm here."

 

His brow comes to rest against hers.

 

_Look at you,_ she thinks now, as she thought a little over a year before, _brave and stupid._

 

Her hands come to rest on his face as the memory of the gun's muzzle streaks past her chin. She doesn't push him away this time. The world can wait. For the first time since she has known him, Frank Castle has no other place to be but here right now.

 

With her.

 

A knot loosens itself in her stomach. Butterflies invade soon after, mad little flutters dancing through her belly just below her navel before swooping further upward in a way that makes her laugh. Their noses nudge in a touch she has perfected with a ghost of long ago, and she thinks Kevin must be smiling down at her this Christmas morning and laughing elation to the stars about the Eskimo kisses Frank softly trails over her face.

 

She thinks it's her time to be brave and stupid, now.

 

Her lips find his, and out pours her love with the featherlight touch. She presses against him gently, hands threading through his longer hair and the early makings of a new beard, and offers her prayers to the forest that surrounds them. _Let this not be in vain, let me have this moment, let us have this space..._

 

His lips press back against hers, soft and uncertain, and his hands find her waist almost blindly. He pulls away a moment, and she makes a noise that sounds all too much like a protest. He exhales a breath that tingles on her skin.

 

She's almost too afraid to look at him. Doesn't know what she will find there in this midwinter time. But then his hands squeeze her waist, gently, softly, and draw her into his arms. Then his lips find hers again, and this time there is an assurance in the touch. Her lips part at the insistence of his kiss, inviting him in further, looping a breath around his, and her trembling hands weave into his hair as she draws him closer still.

 

They wind and weave around each other, swaying away from ivy's invasion on the oak of their home, dancing complications on the porch before tracking snow's flurries inside on their coats and underneath their boots. She smiles even as hunger claims her and sweeps her off her feet, smiles as the kisses he offered to her lips become trails on her skin instead, smiles when home sings through her veins and makes her legs shake with anticipatory joy.

 

They almost stumble into the tree, and he finally lodges a complaint that it is indeed too much tree for this small a home. She laughs and offers an "it's perfect" because it's all the gift he carried with him for her and she thinks she's never had something that was this much _enough_ to accept so freely.

 

"Nah," he says, then, and there is reverence in his dismissal, "you're perfect."

 

She finds it hard to argue with that opinion of her when he hums her name against her skin, sprawls their love out on the bedsheets until she's gasping delight out to the wooden beams and branches of holly, fits against her so perfectly that it's almost as if he has never been anywhere else but in her arms.

 

A song flits through her, quick as the wind, when his forehead comes to rest against her brow and their breaths finally intertwine.

 

_Of all the trees that are in the wood,_

_the holly bears the crown._


End file.
